This year, my institution is helping to host the first CNC for our city (and surrounding region). I hope to of course inform current iNatters in this region that this is happening so they can partake, but the biggest thing I think for us is outreach to those who may have heard of iNat and don’t use it, or those who don’t know of it at all. To do this, not only do we need to spread the “good word,” but also aim to get people started using the app, to which we plan to accomplish with some training sessions hosted by my organization.
My question is, is there anyone who has gone through a similar process of launching a CNC chapter in their city, and if so, how did you get people interested and involved? Thanks!!
Probably you know what I’m about to say, which is why you were careful to NOT mention students in your post!
You will get lots of helpful tips here to answer your question about promoting the CNC, but feelings are mixed about CNC on this forum.
On one hand, it’s a huge draw for new users to iNat. But at what cost?
At the cost of burdening identifiers with low-quality observations “made at gunpoint” by students who don’t care, and by teachers who don’t understand.
I think what you’re doing is great! I just want you to understand the landscape if this tone creeps into the answers.
To be honest, it would be great to get students (high school and college specifically haha) involved, but I’d also love to get adults involved. I was sort of hoping it could be a way to increase usership, in a sense.
I didn’t know that CNC had mixed feelings! I’ve always thought that bioblitzes were a great way to get community together, get them outdoors, and appreciating and learning from nature all the while contributing to community science. That being said, I totally see why some might take issue with this as it brings the sometimes messy observations that come with younger or inexperienced users!
Obviously I want to help not hurt, haha. As an educator I’m always super eager to share with the public ways to get involved to spark passion about things. Is there other ways to go about it, you think? Maybe CNC is not the right venue!!
You have another thread about providing an iNaturalist class. If you can time that to be before the CNC, that could help prepare people to participate.
I helped with a CNC in my community a few years ago and we set up an even in a local park. A science educator and avid iNat user did a lot of the organizing. She brought tools to temporarily capture observations such as nets, clear containers and buckets for collecting from ponds.
She and other volunteers were also able to suggest good ideas of where to look for wild creatures. There were field guides available. Some other orgs got involved with displaying information on tables (eg local forest service and outreach on conservation issues from the town).
I think there were people who participated in the in-person activities that never uploaded observations to iNat, but hopefully they still enjoyed it. For those that did post observations, I was monitoring for issues with observations and making sure that they all had at least a broad ID.
Over all, we didn’t have a ton of participation on iNat for that CNC, but it was more engagement than we normally would have had at that time of year.
There is a lovely video clip out of New Zealand showcasing the enthusiasm of both the scientist’s and the new observer’s WOW!
Cape Town gets lots of obs from Scouts and Guides, and some are very young. That enthusiam absolutely needs nurturing.
If you can include ‘coercing’ some extra identifiers to help when the obs come in, that will be better all round. You need both taxon specialists, and generalists like me to sort for them. Dragonfly? - yes, but, they are not going to pick thru all the Unknowns, or even all the insects. So sad to see lovely pictures of interesting stuff languishing when CNC is done and dusted. If those newbies are going to come back, to stick around - they need IDs on their shiny new obs.
And that would be helped enormously if people did have a basic ‘how to observe’ class first, to try to avoid the (from my ‘plant’ point of view):
Super close up of flower, which narrows it down to about 20 species in the absence of leaves.
Distant photo of plant that shows nothing useful for ID.
Blurry photo of plant matter with no distinguishing features.
etc
observations that seem so common in ‘group’ events. They come in regularly, of course, but when a whole lot land all at once, they’re even less likely to get the attention required for ID (if any is possible). And as you say, that doesn’t encourage anyone to continue on iNat!
As a lecturer myself, I´ll try to share some ideas.
First, the definitely wrong way, but unfortunately, every year the most common one: Simply take your class to the nearby park and say, Now you have 45 minutes to take as many pictures of “nature” so as we win the contest. And that´s it, mission accomplished.
Instead:
before, have time to go through the iNat tutorial which you can find here, to teach students how to use the app properly
divide them into groups focused on different matters: garden weeds, insects, wild trees, etc.
take more time than an average biology lesson, plan a hike to the countryside
insist that it is not important who “wins” with the most photographs, it´s the quality that matters
don´t stop with the challenge, work with the data, have students present the results later in class
I can’t speak for others, but the time of year that CNC happens is my biggest deterrent. The timing just seems to line up with the time of year where plants technically are sprouting, but most are cotyledons or just way too immature to ID accurately, and the bugs aren’t out yet so we may be teaching bad habits with it. And I’m not sure how you or I would fix that.
Lichens, mosses, and birds are all doable that time of year, but moving targets and things requiring microscopy are basically bigger deterrents to newbies than draws. The “challenge” part could draw people in if there were seasonal challenges, but the annual nature of it just makes it hard to convince people that we’d even be remotely competitive with other areas.
Do you have community leagues, community associations, etc near you (NOT the same as HOAs!!)? Or could you engage with local community garden groups, “forest school” programs, etc?
I’m planning to engage my community garden with cataloguing the “nature” we attract with our green space, which will likely end up being bugs, mosses, etc, phrasing it this way will hopefully avoid pictures of carrot sprouts, etc.
Thanks, Tony. I meant to share that link, and then I got distracted. I will note that that video doesn’t contain any clips about vetting, which is an important part of the process:
With regard to Ben’s criticism of the timing of CNC:
The Great Southern Bioblitz was created to fix that.
As someone who lives at 50º North in Calgary, I can say that if you wanted to pick a time of year that was snow-free, you could hardly pick a worse time of year than April.
CNC was created in California’s Mediterranean climate, and I’m sure that it was never intended to be a global thing.
Like iNat itself, the CNC is one of those rare things in life that became way more successful than they ever intended. The CNC founders would not have chosen April if they would have been planning a global event from Day 1.
Luckily for us, one of the co-founders of the CNC – Alison Young — now works for iNat, so maybe she can jump on here and shed some light on why they chose April for CNC #1. I think it was timed to coincide with the first Citizen Science Day, which might have been chosen because it was someone’s birthday? I can’t remember, or maybe I never knew.
Yes, I’m pretty sure that was part of the original motivation for that date. Plus it’s spring time in California and there may or may not have been some good low tides up by the Bay…(although we still got beaten by LA)
I think you and Rebecca and Alison are all tidepoolers, so that makes sense that you would have chosen a spring tide with the intention of kicking LA’s *ss.
Maybe that spring tide in 2016 was pushed even lower by a perigean event and by offshore winds. Too bad @isopodguy wasn’t there to help you!
Yes, CNC was dreamed up as a celebration of the first ever Citizen Science Day, which was on April 16 that year. The first CNC was also 8 days long, which was exhausting!
We did initially think that CNC was going to be a one-time event, but so many folks in other cities were interested in the idea that we decided to keep it going, having no clue it would become so popular. Over time, talking to local organizers, we moved it to the end of April, but everyone organizing the global CNC has a ton of other programs they’re responsible for that happen at other times of the year, so there’s never been capacity to hold more than one CNC, or move it to a different time of year. We’ve always been supportive of people taking the CNC concept and implementing similar events at times that work well for their communities, hence the Great Southern Bioblitz, the Northern Rocky Mountain Biodiversity Challenge, and the Asia Nature Challenge — all born from the CNC!
If you can round up the 10 ‘most observed sp’ from a previous local CNC - and motivate generalist identifiers to sweep that bulk aside - you also free up access and time for the really interesting stuff. Thought extinct, range extension, vagrant, new species …
I’m using “tidepooler” to mean, “Someone who explores intertidal zones (between high tide and low tide), especially with the intention of making observations on iNaturalist”.
Ah, I did that when I was visiting friends in Socal. I got confused because you seemed to then talk about beating people in Los Angeles, but Los Angeles has a shoreline and I assume that shoreline has tidepools, unless you specifically meant within the actual municipal bounds of the city of LA, where it looks like all the shoreline is beach, artificially placed rocks, or artificially constructed constructs.