CNC is really not what iNat needs. iNat need documentation of more species, more data for rare species, etc.
CNC encourages people to look in the city. Now, I have an idea.
I think we should make a new nature challenge (Travel nature challenge?) and group it according to countries. It can mean local parks, national parks, forests, but just something that gets people to travel to locations looking for nature, preferably somewhere they’ve not been before.
To find rare and/or endangered species is not that easy, sometimes you are lucky.
I guess, someone who is from an area, or hikes regularly in that area, is likely to get a better coverage than a widely travelled explorer ;-)
“Why travel far, the good stuff is at your feet”
In Italy, what I’ve noticed in recent years is that many people with a high number of observations made during the CNC (over a thousand) then didn’t make any observations at all during the rest of the year.
On the one hand, this suggests that the goal of connecting people with nature and familiarizing them with making observations through iNaturalist wasn’t being achieved. On the other, there’s the risk that where the CNC is successful, it could create strong human pressure on some natural environments, especially during the peak nesting season for birds.
Furthermore, many species that are visible in seasons other than spring are not being observed.
This year, things are a little better—the decision was made not to accept observations of captive/cultivated organisms, which only created a huge waste of energy in data centers, as well as to remove the emphasis on the number of observations, which evidently created a senseless bulimia. But I think the real benefit is limited.
What’s needed is to make people fall in love with being outdoors, in nature, and reawaken their joy in learning about the life around them, documenting and protecting it. This can be achieved through consistent commitment throughout the year, including through gamification, such as “search for and photograph that flower growing this season” or “who will be the first to spot the return of the swallows?”
Perhaps, as a gentle nudge, a local “Biodiversity Month” could be established and participants asked to make at least 10 observations a week, posting them on iNaturalist, keeping interest alive by regularly reporting the most beautiful observations.
In fact, all habits require regular practice to be acquired, rather than a brief moment of excess.
This is not surprising. More noticeable would be the ones who do continue. It is difficult to make people do something. Those who do continue, is the value of CNC.
Maybe more encouragement could be made to making observations in the surrounding area, since I don’t think being “in the city” is a requirement, it is just a way of grouping participants
While I see your point, I feel like one of the core concepts behind the City Nature Challenge is to make nature accessible. A lot of people who live in urban areas are disconnected with nature and have a lot of misconceptions about the natural world. City Nature Challenge (which oftentimes encompasses urban areas but also stretches to neighboring ones that can be suburban or rural) encourages people to notice the bird in the tree and the flowers between the pavement. I think it’s really cool because it is a venue to get people inspired by and connected to nature, which could foster a life in conservation, or at least being more mindful of it :)
Almost every day there is some kind of bioblitz going on somewhere in the world. They have various focuses. CNC is just the biggest and most famous one.
I agree, What the OP is describing is more of a bioblitz that focuses on an area, typically in a “wild” status and that might be of conservation interest or lacking information about its biodiversity. The CNC isn’t intended to be that kind of bioblitz, but it can be, depending on where the observer is.
Many people who live in urban areas do not have the ability or resources to do this. It is especially important to connect these people to nature, if we want them to have any appreciation for everything else that is beyond their access.
I respectfully disagree. Traveling does not guarantee more species or more data. From my experience as someone who has the opportunity to travel and visit new places, traveling gives me the opportunity to grow MY species list, but probably does not add more value overall. Getting to know the species around your home, your business, your town makes it easier to spot the unusual, the rarer species, the out of the ordinary.
And even though the CNC is not primarily about competition, it does give one the excuse to record everything around you, not just the ‘new’ things. And in the process important data is generated about the things we miss during our search for the unusual.
Meanwhile 38K … 40K … 51K … obs in the Global (not in ‘my city’) project Need ID. I aim at the African ones …
Tourists and Travelers do amazing work and are finding amazing stuff in the Caribbean where i am mainly identifying. Often they are not aware of it, and often observations of rare taxa in remote areas are sitting month and years without ID, as the organisms are in difficult to ID, new to iNaturalist and very few people know them. Eventually they will get identified though.
I was working my way through the Hispaniolan endemic genera of Asteraceae lately, and checked old and new observations in this family to see whether these genera were already observed or not. Some haven’t been observed yet, some had been observed by local observers, but for two genera i found just one observation each (in the pile of old unidentified Asteraceae observations), both by tourists who had left the resort and went to a National Park. So yes, tourists can contribute great observations.
On the other hand, motivating people to travel might have a negative impact on the environment. Don’t forget it was Michelin the tire producer, who started the restaurant guide by the same name, in order to get people into their cars and make them drive more, so Michelin can sell more tires.
Actually, the CNC is for areas away from cities just as much as for cities. I spent about 4 hours today making observations in my local CNC area; one place is a state forest, the other a quiet dirt road along a river, where some of the riverfront is state wildlife management area. No cities involved!
people tend to think of cities are biodiversity deadzones, which is far from true - it’s good to encourage people to slow down and look around more, they might be surprised at how many critters and plants are out there.
and at least for my city, the CNC range is quite large. i was at a nature preserve ~50 miles outside of the city, and my observations were within the zone
is it more important to produce more data or to produce more naturalists?
Encouraging inexperienced people with mostly short-ranged cameras to hunt for rare species in remote places probably isn’t the best thing for those species.
Travel, particularly where it involves the use of fossil fuels, can have its own detrimental effects on the ecosystems we are trying to preserve; this should always be kept in mind. Travel to a new location is not a good in itself. Revisiting the same place and developing a better knowledge of its organisms can be highly valuable even in iNat terms.
“No one will protect what they don’t care about; and no one will care about what they have never experiened” - Sir David Attenborough
I completely agree with your response. People tend to think of nature as being away from their home and far in the countryside, but it’s absolutely everywhere. There’s a lot of wildlife in urban areas that CNC encourages people to discover, and as more of the world gets developed and urbanized, we need to pay attention to what is still trying to live in those areas.
I do understand what OP was trying to say, but I also agree with what others have said about there being bioblitz events in localized areas or with smaller organizations all the time. I don’t think CNC needs to change, it just needs to be promoted more and people who use iNaturalist on the regular need to make sure they’re submitting IDs for other people as well as submitting observations. I’m trying to do better at that myself.
With over half of the world’s population living in urban areas, I think it’s great that CNC asks people in cities to notice the biodiversity around them.
If the OP wants a different type of project, they are free to organize their own project. CNC started with just two cities ten years ago. I think CNC can give any project organizers some ideas about how to grow a project over time.
While this is a good idea in principle, it comes with a lot of issues and downsides that range from the personal like cost, access, and the danger of coming across as a sort of gatekeeping, to the environmental as it encourages people to en masse go into areas where their impacts on the species and environment will be far larger than elsewhere.
And a major aspect of the CNC is in line with the goal of iNat, which is to connect people with nature. The CNC is a way of getting people to find and recognize that ‘nature’ is all around us, even in urban environments in areas that the average person is already located. This then fosters greater interest and engagement.
And, as someone whose o is is to help conserve and protect these species, the very last thing we need is people who aren’t all that familiar with the the local situation and environment going out searching for them. This is already a big problem in a lot of places and makes conservation and protection work more difficult in many cases.
Thank you.
I’m working on West Coast U.S. ones.