The very first City Nature Challenge, San Francisco vs. Los Angeles, was in April to coincide with the first ever national Citizen Science Day, which also happened to line up nicely with Earth Day. Every year since then we’ve had the local organizers vote on the dates.
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Is DE Germany? Pa would be philadephia? I’m from NZ which is New Zealand! Many are from OC, which is Other Countries!
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It would depend on the year, Ecuador has only dry and rainy season. Yesterday was a hot day, today rained all the afternoon…
Quito is cold and >200 meters above the sea level and has a lot of participants too
Its the first year for both cities.
I think:
DE state of Delaware (next to Pennsylvania)
PA state of Pennsylvania
OC in the states is usually Orange County and is typically California-centric despite there being an “OC” in many, many U.S. states/commonwealths.
@kiwifergus, I love OC= Other Countries!
Everyone, let’s remember this is an international forum and try to use longhand for place names and consider offering context to help people understand our points when they reference geographical locations. I’m as guilty as the next on this front but we can all gently remind one another and strive to do better!
Edit: My vote would be for a May date for the CNC so I and others could also participate in upstate New York (higher elevation and several hours north of New York City). We had very cold rain and snow up here and temps in high 30s/low 40s (Fahrenheit) yesterday with potentially hypothermia-friendly conditions. There are soooo many major northern hemisphere cities that I can only imagine how many more folks would contribute if the dates factored them in. As a previous poster mentioned, I do agree that we can’t please everyone but it seems pleasing a lot more people with a date change of a few weeks makes sense if the point is better engagement with more people in more places. It’s great that voting is how the date is decided but that doesn’t account for what dates one chooses to vote for. As an experiment you could make a poll here and take the temperature of those of us on the forum in a more quantitative fashion. Bottom line, it would be great for us northerners to have the option to participate safely.
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We’re actually past spring ephemeral peak in southern PA, although it came early this year. (Shenks Ferry was at the tail end of bloom, with lots of phlox–normally I’d expect to catch the bulk of trilliums and bluebells about this time.)
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Chiming in from Hong Kong - April is the very latest I’d want the CNC here without skipping straight to autumn, since a good many of us would quite reasonably refuse to go outdoors in the summer heat and >90% humidity unless absolutely necessary. You could feel the water on your skin as soon as you stepped outside today, even… Thankfully, the very lucky combination of overcast sky, monsoon wind, and 26C air temperature kept it tolerable.
Of course, if the next event does get shuffled down to May or June we can still hang out in our infinite number of malls and take a couple thousand pictures of the little sparrows that always seem to find their way in, haha 
(Up to me it would have been in March so we could capture some of the migratory birds 
)
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Isn’t this really extensive ‘survivor bias’ though? We aren’t a local organizer because we’ve been excluded, so we didn’t get a vote in Vermont. I’m guessing we’d have been involved in a summer one, we are one of the largest and biggest and oldest inat communities per capita. I’m sure that’s true for other northern areas too.
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How about have a City Nature Identification Challenge, instead? Cities compete to reduce ID backlog. I know, I know, not quite as much fun.
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there is the option to travel… to a city that is hosting one. I wonder if you could also register as a non-participatory organiser so that you can chip in with a vote/opinion when the next venue is being decided.
not usually going to be an option for us to travel this time of year… but i’ve already come to terms two years ago that city nature challenge isn’t for me or others in my community. Oh well. One year we were in LA for it and it was fun… that was the year LA won :)
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lol, come to NZ for next years one!
oh man that will be fun. but with a less than 1 year old kid the chance is 0% . Maybe some day
NZ is a very baby friendly country. We even let our Prime Minister have one while in office :)
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Yes, I’ve been happily looking at spring ephemerals for weeks–thank you for your IDs. :) It did seem early this year. I guess I was thinking that Delaware is still tolerable in terms of temps in May while northern Pennsylvania is still catching up. Today, for instance, my old hometown is currently at 38F degrees. That’s lower than normal, but it’s not very unusual for there. In fact, I was in Ithaca, New York, when it snowed the third week in May. Darn, it was cold. Probably the rest of Pennsylvania is better suited for April, but the Northern Tier with its higher altitude is always cooler and drier, so May is really spring there. I have divided geographical loyalties.
Interesting thread. For me, the “silliness” (or at least questionable logic/rationale) is more about the underlying premise of having groups of people from areas with very different levels of biodiversity “competing” against one another in the first place…almost like having groups of runners competing against one another in a timed mile but not controlling for elevation, terrain, weather conditions, etc. I had the same reaction when I got into a birding more and started seeing the more “competitive” birders throwing out “Christmas Bird Count” tallies and comparing those. Apples and oranges when we’re talking Christmas in Miami versus Omaha ;)
I get this is all about leveraging the competitive spirit to get folks off the couch and interacting with nature. And of course this provides a great “teachable moment” to pull up some maps and discuss with students that biodiversity, weather/climate, seasonal differences, etc. are going to “tilt the field” when it comes to putting up numbers against cities in more biologically “rich” areas or during more comparatively “rich” seasons/times.
The original CNC was between LA and SF right? So not a significantly different “playing field” there. But as this gets expanded into competitions between cities the world over, the underlying logic/fairness seems to break down.
It seems like long-term, the focus should be more on encouraging competition between more “similarly situated” cities, or perhaps intra-city competitions between teams (e.g. schools?), or trying to best the total species count for that area over time as this event continues to play out over the years.
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Yeah, though I think most of us care more about “how fun is it to go iNatting at this time of year” than anything to do with species counts.
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Sorry, not trying to exclude anyone–just a crappy typist trying to save a few keystrokes.
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I do it all the time! No worries :)
Didn’t mean to single you out…just appreciated the opportunity to remind myself and everyone else about it, so, thanks!
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No problem–I do need to consider that my shorthand may be puzzling. Thank you for explicating my abbreviations.
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As an alternative brainstorm (there are probably better ways to go about it but an idea) different cities could be divided into tiers based on vegetation hardiness zones (and/or whatever relevant metric would apply in the tropics), each tier gets its own CNC weekend. Maybe the “CNC Year” is earth day to earth day, when all the results are in and the global winners/interesting results announced.
Think of the possibilities! Most of us can reasonably travel to a few different zones. You could participate in multiple CNCs throughout the year or if your home tier’s challenge came at a bad time for your personal life, drive a couple hours a month before or later and not have to miss out on getting a CNC in.
I planned to travel to Cleveland or Rochester this year (no Buffalo event) but personal circumstances did not cooperate.
On the planning logistics side, not sure this would add any more work really, just spread it out over time- along with the server load.
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