I absolutely agree with every word. Among my self-appointed daily iNat tasks is to ID plant observations from a region which includes one of Italy’s largest cities. This usually gives me about six pages a day, but when I opened the search yesterday, I was met with several hundred pages, quite impossible for me to take on alone without ignoring my “regulars”. I ended up skipping them to ensure that existing or future regular participants with a genuine interest were not overlooked in a miasma of anonymous green leaves. I can of course continue to simply mark them as reviewed, but they’re going to stay there clogging up the already heavily burdened ID system indefinitely for every IDer new to the region to work through.
Now that could indicate that the CNC is successful, but 95% of those observations were clearly made without any thought, just a few leaves photographed from a distance, general scenes without obvious focus, or blurred images clearly taken from a moving car. I’m sorry, but I really can’t see that encouraging that sort of mindless and “senseless bulimia” for a couple of days is actually going to lead to people engaging with nature in any sort of meaningful or long-term way. It feels to me to be quite the opposite.
I’m not necessarily saying that sort of event doesn’t serve a purpose, perhaps it does (although I’d be MUCH happier if it took place far from iNaturalist to avoid overloading an already severely taxed ID system), but I believe Valentino’s suggestions of regular challenges, or a local biodiversity month, could be much more effective in stimulating a real and long-lasting engagement with nature.
Yes I know, I’m being my usual “elitist” self, pushing for quality over quantity, not just in the observations themselves, but also in what we mean by “engagement”. But it’s because I care. Deeply. About nature but also about iNaturalist.
More data, or so I believe. It is an opinion that may vary.
This. I’d be curious what percentage of people new to nature who participate in the CNC in fact end up continuing to engage with nature once the event has ended. And of those people, I would be curious what part of the event worked for them and whether this could be reproduced in some other manner that didn’t create such a burden on iNat’s infrastructure and volunteer IDers.
Because my suspicion is that in spite of the cosmetic changes made to CNC this year and the effort to ensure that local organizers attend training, it doesn’t seem to me that these changes tackle the fundamental issues with the event (or rather, with the event being documented using iNaturalist).
What I’ve seen in past years is that the cities that produce a high proportion of quality observations and meaningful biodiversity data during the CNC seem to be cities where there is already a solid core base of iNaturalist users and people with some previous experience in biodiversity recording – in other words, they are not successful because they are attracting nature-naive people to engage with nature and teaching them how to make good observations within the course of the CNC, but because the participants are already engaged with nature and are using it as an opportunity to do so in the context of a friendly competition with their neighbors.
Down the CNC years - I am less willing to give a green, or whatever, blur its moment. But I have had one good experience - a newbie added 8 ? pictures as separate obs. I said - combine them - then I will @mention a taxon specialist. Combination achieved ! Now I will work for their ID. PS we have Genus from the taxon specialist.
These weeks around CNC are our opportunity to catch and encourage the next cohort of iNatters.
I think the CNC is a good opportiunity for those already on I-Nat and newbies alike.
I do lots of identifying but have lomited time to “forage” for my own observations. CNC gives the the motivation to get out there an look.
For those in the city there is not just the obversations seen while walking around the block ut also in the local parks. Today I ventured to a park I had not been to, not far from home, but a place where I know others have found some interesting and rare observations. Out of about 30 observations I took, some local and common, I have got some new ones to add to my list, and hopefully a rarer one too.
It all depends on what you’re motivated by…
What I would like to see with the CNC is for the event to lean into the fact that the CNC is a global biodiversity snapshot taken at the same time of year every year. The longer the CNC goes on, the richer the data becomes, especially as the leaders make the tweaks to improve the data quality.
It’s a huge, messy dataset as anything that mobilizes this many people will be. The CNC along with the Great Southern BioBlitz and the Home River BioBlitz have tremendous data potential to understanding global biodiversity.
I think this is the point, in a nutshell. It amazes me how many people will talk all about wanting to save wildlife, but will eradicate all wild things from their own property. As if “wildlife” is something important to exist “over there” somewhere “away from me”. Recognizing the amazing diversity of species right under our noses is how we come to appreciate what we personally can do for wildlife on a daily basis. Throwing money at organizations trying to save a charismatic mammal on the other side of the world isn’t nearly as impactful on the environment as a whole as making good decisions about what plants are allowed to grow right here on my own land. (Or if you’re in a city in an apartment, helping decide what landscaping plants are used around your building) Nature is right there, migratory birds need food on your block, and wherever you are, you’re probably standing on some new species to science (probably a nematode, fungus, or microbe in the soil) as we speak. The idea that there’s “people places” and “nature places” and that those two places can or should be kept separate is the precise poisonous idea that’s gotten us into such a bad place environmentally as a planet.
Out of curiosity, I checked and NYC Council District 03 (on the west side of Manhattan) alone has over a thousand species recorded. Manhattan has about 5000 species recorded. The entirety of NYC has about ten thousand species recorded. This is more species than recorded on iNaturalist for the entire state of Iowa. (Yes I know that Iowa has much fewer observations, I just thought it was an interesting comparison)
Ну, в своей стране я просто делаю весенний биоблиц.
Активно его не пиарю, но более-менее увлечённые люди подтягиваются.
В нашей стране государственные праздники весной, являющиеся официальными выходными это 1 и 9 мая. В зависимости от года это может быть 3 и даже 4 подряд выходных дня. Ещё у нас государственным выходным считается Радуница, но её дата плавающая, второй вторник после православной Пасхи. Всегда выходит минимум 3 выходных дня, смотря на какую субботу переносят отработку понедельника.
Исходя из этих трёх дат я и определяю срок биоблица, так как на больших выходных люди чаще выбираются на природу.
You are right, CNC DOES have a problem!
The problem is that so few people know about iNaturalist or the natural world and would rather be blind to the nature around them than embrace it!
The CNC is great for getting people on Inat and finding their local biodiversity. Yes, there are obviously flaws (3K observations of the nonexistent species Taraxacum officinale in a single Czech city with fewer than 300k people?), but it is working as intended.
I would recommend we completely eliminate observation leaderboards and only focus on species.
To be honest, CNC should be made into smaller bioblitzes, perhaps focusing on certain groups, and the leaderboards should be from species as you said. Perhaps two months long Hemiptera bioblitzes, then beetle bioblitzes and also fly bioblitzes since no one pays attention to how greatly diverse flies are. We need people to focus on small critters since a larger percent of creatures are all small in size.
Smaller blitzes are already a thing - with all due respect, I think you may be underestimating the amount of time and effort it requires to get people to participate in events like this. CNC is a big event that people talk about and gets new people involved. If the sole purpose of iNat was to generate biodiversity survey data, I may agree with you. But there is also the goal of connecting people with the natural world that surrounds them.
There are people who find iNat via the CNC, use it for a day, and then forget it. There are people who find iNat via the CNC and go on to collect awesome data. There are people who find iNat via the CNC who don’t make many observations, but gain a connection to their local ecosystem and decide to spend their time advocating for protecting the flora and fauna.
There is room for everyone.
Many are also, from what I gather (I’m more into plants, myself), more or less unidentifiable to species from the average ‘casual observer’ photo - which may actually discourage people from continuing to use iNat. I assume we’d also need more identifiers to have such bioblitzes being successful rather than burnout-inducing - and more identifiers isn’t something that’s just available on demand.
More general bioblitzes like CNC have their place in getting people interested, after which they can then potentially chose to specialise, or generalise, or whatever they will actually enjoy - because without some level of enjoyment, most people won’t keep going.
Yes. Identifiers are lacking on iNat, especially skilled ones. If there wasn’t a scarcity, and there were more dedicated identified, I would have not been the first to id over 500 species in just 8-9 months.
Unknowns during CNC have been a headache for identifiers. Yet iNat does not care about the small community of identifiers, even if iNat depends on them so much. They said not to add images of three P’s, but they did not tell people to be responsible and not submit things as" “Unknown” or “Life” etc.
i usually ID using filters to only show me arthropods, but things like the CNC encourages me to spend more time in the Unknowns. if you don’t want to look at Unknowns, don’t.
personally i prefer an Unknown to an [incorrect CV suggestion].
‘I thought that was plant’ but I see lichen. Now we have Kingdom Disagreement at Life (24.6K which you can filter to suit you - this is not only CNC26) Which needs a dedicated and obsessed identifier to push Life at least to a single Kingdom. Africa I do.
I feel like this is an area where there has been some mission creep in the objective of the City Nature Challenge. I remember years ago looking at the map and thinking it unfair that most projects in the CNC were limited to the urban area around particular cities, while one or two used an entire county, giving lots of opportunity for participants in that region to find more biodiverse areas to search. Now I look at the map and see many entire counties, a number of states, and at least one entire country (plus the global project). I suppose the “City” part of “City Nature Challenge” might still be useful marketing to encourage people in cities to participate, but it’s clearly not an accurate description any more.
I couldn’t agree more! I’m always more stoked to find a new organism nearby than a new one from further away.
T. officinale at least have a meaning, even if an alias for a section. However, for some of them, CV suggests T. erythrospermum which should be one specific and difficult-to-confirm species, but many seam to apply it to the whole section Erythrosperma. Most of the wrong CV identifications are section Taraxacum, of course.
For me, CNC brings frustration in genuses Rubus and Rosa. Both of them are mostly unidentifiable at this specific season. Most leaves are in a highly non-specific sprouting shape, no flowers, any remnants of fruits mostly unusable. And still hundreds of observations that have some specific name. Mostly a single photo from distance. Those observations that are still at the genus level should definitely rather remain there.
I’d say there’s room for a wide variety of events to be held, including CNCs themselves as their organizers adjust their structure year by year in response to feedback.
As one part of our local CNC, I myself just led a bug walk in a regional park. For what it’s worth, observation of smaller critters is rather tricky, I think, and it may be seen as quirkier than observation of charismatic megafauna. So potential bug aficionados can really benefit from an opportunity to pick up tacit knowledge in the company of an experienced bug-watcher and from the social reinforcement one gets by going out in a group.