Having City Nature Challenge In April Is Silly

General
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Wow! I had no idea that the supporting infrastructure is so shallow and narrow! Kudos in the extreme to both of you - it’s not trivial to start a global movement :grin:

I’m sure others have suggested it, and I know it would take additional time, but i am absolutely positive there are grants available for this kind of activity - federal and state, conservation organizations… I know that the grant process is seriously intensive but, if you have university links, i’m sure there are resources - it does seem to be the basis for survival in many schools! You might be able to get enough to fund a part time person to help take care of the administrative tasks and leave you more time to focus on the recruiting, support materials design, and other content-specific activities.

And sorry - i’m on the phone so i can’t check ur profile for ur affiliations :-)

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I appreciate all the great ideas in this thread, but City Nature Challenge is not our full-time jobs, unfortunately - which means that (1) we can’t dedicate all of our time to this, and (2) due to constraints and other obligations of our jobs, there are times of the year that we simply couldn’t organize the CNC.
I co-organize a bioblitz of the entire California coastline in early- to mid-June. We both have partnerships with our local parks departments and other organizations to run bioblitzes with them throughout the year. The two of us are co-PIs on an NSF grant studying youth learning in citizen science. I’m a marine biologist that works on my own research. We both work for non-profits and write grants to support our work. We’re yet to find an organization who wants to fund or give us a grant for the CNC, mainly because so many grants (1) do not want to support staff time, and what we really really (really really) need is a full-time person to run the CNC, and (2) are not supporting world-wide work, they are very often region or country-specific. We will keep trying of course. Writing grants is a lot of work.

It also takes a ton of work just to get all the organizers up to speed and the cities ready to go for one weekend, including teaching everyone how to use iNat, how to host bioblitzes, best practices for teaching other people to use iNat, checking every single project that gets made to make sure it’s made correctly, creating logos in multiple languages, maintaining the website, dealing with APIs to create the leaderboard on the website because not every city uses iNat, writing press releases, answering questions from the organizers and all the other people who hear about the CNC and have questions, developing all the educational materials (thanks to our education working group!), holding monthly meetings, doing evaluation at the end of the CNC, etc. When we hold a meeting we actually hold three meetings on three different days at three different times to accommodate all the time zones of the organizers, and go over the same information three times. We also break down the results in so many other ways besides just top cities for observations, species, and people - it’s hard to get away from those since those are what iNat displays on projects, but we provide the organizers so many ways to look at the results that highlight smaller cities, cities new to iNat/CNC, different climates, etc. And we try to make all CNC-related decisions as democratic as possible, making sure we hear the voices of our organizers. Our organizers choose the “place” that they want for their CNC projects as well.

Having multiple CNCs or a rolling CNC would mean we’re training and working with new organizers throughout the year. I love the idea. It’s just not feasible currently.

I know it’s the internet and I shouldn’t take things personally, but many of these comments pretty much feel like “you two aren’t doing this very well and I have much better ideas for organizing the City Nature Challenge” and it kind of sucks. I consider myself part of the iNaturalist community as well - I may not post in the forum all that often so might not be a recognized voice, but I have 12K observations and have been out there documenting nature using iNat since 2011, just like many of you. I generally feel like the CNC has been pretty successful, especially in helping bring new areas around the world to iNaturalist, and for four days, giving lots of people a reason to connect with their local nature.

I of course welcome thoughts about the CNC, but please realize that the CNC isn’t run by iNaturalist, and as organizers we’re pretty much at capacity for what we can do. I would appreciate any suggestions about the City Nature Challenge that are solution-oriented given our constraints (e.g., if you want multiple CNCs, who can you suggest to organize the other ones?). Thanks.

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45

The whole-year challenge sounds really good to me

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Thank you for what you do.

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It’s not being in NZ i am worried about it is the 500 hour flight or whatever from New England to there.

the results sure speak for themselves! It’s been a huge success. Which is why more people want to participate. I felt pretty blown off when I brought this up before, so maybe i am sounding crankier than i should and i am sorry. in the end this event is just not for me and my community, so long as it’s in April, and that’s ok. Maybe we should just all get together and organize a parallel summer one for northern areas, and leave CNC to be something that isn’t for cold areas (of course i don’t have lots of time to commit either, so it’s easy for me to say). To be fair we don’t really have cities here, either. What about a New England VS the Midwest VS Ontario type thing?

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48

No matter what dates are used, there will be people who feel left out. Even within the same city, different dates are optimal for different species. Here a few weeks in May are awesome for all the migrating warblers that come through. The hot humid days of August are great for insects, but really bad for birders.

That’s why I thought if it was feasible that it might be ideal to let at least the iNat project competition portion of the CNC run for a whole year. Each city could choose when to hold their own local CNC bioblitz type events based on what’s best for their location, but it could all ultimately go towards the annual totals on the iNat front. If it’s a visible running total we could see what cities are leaders for each individual month, so they could sort of compete against each other in the short term. My thought process was that it might spread out the strain on the iNat servers as well.

Of course though I suggested these things being completely ignorant as to what goes into organizing or setting this up. :grinning: We all really do appreciate all the work that goes into it.

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49

Thank you for the additional perspective- I really had no idea that the CNC was external to iNat, and that there are even cities participating outside of the iNat framework. I certainly wouldn’t want my comment above to imply that the work you’ve done in creating and running this event is deficient. The frustrations that have been experienced and expressed are real but I would think they’re an inevitable part of the process when a concept like this explodes to a global scale.

The emotional responses coming in really ought to validate the work that you’ve done- people are upset because they want to participate! But us would-be participants need to take responsibility for that by directing those emotions appropriately and take your request for solutions-oriented conversation to heart. You know, ask not what CNC can do for us but what we can do for CNC. As someone with no university affiliations who doesn’t live in a city, I hope I can still say that. I had a lot of fun participating the one year I did live in a city. Not sure what I can truly do personally to contribute right now beyond helping with the current event’s IDing, but I’m sure as a community working together in good faith we can find ways to support the growth process of CNC.

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Apologies if I sounded cranky… we just got the largest late-spring snowstorm ever recorded in Chicago. :(

The ideal solution would certainly be to have independently organized dates for each city timed to the local peak biodiversity, but I can appreciate how that may be something that has to be slowly built towards as this event grows. But the next best bet is to hold this at a time when the majority of the cities in the Northern Hemisphere are thoroughly green and buzzing with life… I’m guessing this is somewhere around mid-June. I’m sure there are going to be small complaints, like the commentators in this thread from Texas and Hong Kong who apparently can’t handle being outside on a summer day (it’s cooler at dawn and dusk, guys), or the birders who want to be out there for the springtime migrations, but this nitpicking shouldn’t outweigh the fact that the present timing heavily excludes the higher latitudes and altitudes from meaningfully engaging, which ultimately hamstrings the significance of the CNC as a global event.

Of course, bumping the date has quite the opposite effect for the handful of cities competing in the Southern Hemisphere. That requires a different solution. But isn’t New Zealand always green and full of Hobbits? Do they even have winter in Australia?

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I hear ya… I flew NZ to Richmond Virgina… 1 week after Sep 11 too, just to make it more challenging :)

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Hi all, I am the other co-founder of the City Nature Challenge with Alison. This is something we have struggled with from year two of the CNC, after it went national in the US. We spend many hours working to figure out ways to make this as fair as we can, but there literally is no real one solution for this. As Alison mentioned before, both of us and our organizations, have been doing this with zero additional funding. It has grown so much, which has been amazing to see. But, with this wild growth comes inevitable growing pains. Timing of the challenge is one of those. It would be great to have more than one challenge throughout the year to accommodate different climates. However, we can barely keep our heads above water with all the organizing of one!! Alison and I (mostly Alison) have come up with some great comparisons of cities in similar climatic regions, so that should at least even the playing field results-wise. However, I get that doesn’t address how much less biodiversity a city experiencing extreme cold/inclement weather will be able to gather versus one in the height of their spring growing season. I appreciate hearing everyone’s thoughts, even though it is hard to read some things as a lead organizer who has poured her heart, soul, physical being into this project. Thanks…

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I think you can be incredibly proud of what you both have achieved. As I mentioned before, there are very few people who, by the end of their lives (which I’m sure is far away for you!) will have done something that has truly changed the world. It’s an amazing feeling, and even if the event were never to happen again, the number of people who have been “introduced” to nature as a result of the events so far will never be “un-introduced” !

I am part of a similar kind of project in another field, and as someone above mentioned, sometimes you just have to let the whining roll off your back - you’ll never please everyone, and that’s OK, because what some people want really needs a different venue (local, or focused on one phyllum, etc.). You have to keep hold of the atta-persons (ok, so what’s the gender-neutral form of atta-girl???!!!), take ideas from the others, and keep that idealism alive.

I’ve only been on the forum since shortly before the migration to this platform, but I can say that almost everything I’ve read has been posted with the intent to be helpful. Sometimes folks get a little tetchy, but most of the time I think they just don’t realize the tone - they really mean well.

Oh, and one last piece of advice, for what it’s worth. You HAVE TO get people to help you at your level, not just the local level. What I read in both of your posts sounds as though you’re a pair of burnouts waiting to happen… For the sake of your own sanity, and for the sake of the continuity of this marvelous event, please take care of yourselves.

So rah, rah, rah, or maybe blah blah blah, but I, too, mean it in the best possible way :-)

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54

I’m in the Chicago area as well. I was the only person outside late yesterday afternoon that I could see. There were no bikers, joggers or dog walkers and mine were the only footprints in the snow, and this was on a normally highly trafficked jogging/biking/walking path area. The ice was pelting me in the face but I wanted to see what might still be visible. In addition to plants being covered or wilted, snow and ice disrupts the identification feature on iNaturalist and also makes for difficulty in camera focusing, as the camera kept focusing on the snow and not on the ducks I was trying to photograph. I’m not complaining, but rather pointing out that in addition to this year’s snow, last year nothing had bloomed yet, so it does put Chicago at a disadvantage.

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As someone from Northern California this is the perfect time to have the CNC. A month later or two later and most everything will be brown. We’d have much less wildflower diversity.

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Also in general I roll my eyes that this should be changed to center the northeastern United States. Almost everything is already biased in favor of that region when it comes to nature themed things. It used to be so hard to even find a decent field guide that covered the West. Boo hoo that this doesn’t perfectly coincide with peak diversity in New York state and Chicago.

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Southern Hemisphere chiming in. We have a Mediterranean type climate in Cape Town, only the inverse to those in the North: Right now we are coming out of a long hot summer still waiting for the winter rains. The veld is awful. A bunch of leaves. Most plants in shutdown mode. Only hard core botanisers can get anything out of it and certainly not the right time of year to try introduce newcomers to nature. So we’ll try organise a Southern Hemisphere CNC next year.

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what makes you say that? why not look at a world population map and compare the abundant population in all areas north of 35 latitude or whatever versus literally only california and see which has more people? California is big but it isn’t THAT big.
http://luminocity3d.org/WorldPopDen/#3/33.87/-70.49 And hey the sierras are still socked in with snow and the desert is past peak so really only LA, SF, and san diego.

I thought the LA vs SF CNC was amazing a few years back… Really, i guess for these reasons and for the sake of the people running it, and also for the sake of the iNat servers, we should just find some people to organize a different one for the northern hemisphere cold areas and the southern hemisphere Mediterraean areas. I really don’t think April is very good for that many other parts of the world either but i’m sure it’s good for someone else, maybe some of the tropical areas, I remember when we went to Costa Rica around this time of year once that it was near the end of the dry season and soon it would be the rainy season which would be harder to do iNat (though i bet amazing herping).

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This is really extremely parochial of you, as if the rest of us had said to you “jeez, just put on a jacket,” which no one did. Heat also kills you if you don’t take appropriate precautions. It’s certainly reasonable to be having the discussion about how to maintain the CNC at the global level, but could you stop calling out dedicated fellow naturalists as wimps just because they’re dealing with a different climate from yours? Given that the event is largely about getting new naturalists to be active, it is relevant that extreme heat deters outdoor activity for most people. The discussion should be about how to make things work best, not about how one region is being singled out for perceived unfairness.

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Well, probably. I went out this morning in the hills around Christchurch and by the time we were heading back to the car, the wind was blowing around 30 mph and it was sleeting very nearly sideways. We were drenched and very cold! But we saw a few cool things to add to our tally.

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very true. as can rain, lightning, snow, etc etc. saturday is a day that could have killed someone if they went out in the woods here wearing cotton unprepared. I agree that this is kind of off topic, as being outdoors will always have its dangers (as does staying inside all the time). I just think it’s worth either tweaking the CNC so a much larger proportion of peopleactually have something to look at other than mud or else starting a parallel event. I appreciate the awesome work of the people who created it (who also do some other eally amazing work, like write books and do a bunch of science!!), i don’t understand why they won’t consider moving it a month later, but it is their event and no one is stopping us from creating another one. If they want to have an event for peak California phenology and we don’t want to do it then since there’s nothing here to see, maybe we should create another one on our own. We aren’t really urban here anyway. Who wants to start brainstorming a New England vs Midwest type event?? I can’t do it this summer since we are having a baby but would at least help for the following one.

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I don’t know about schism-ing it out into totally separate events. I do wonder about whether the current organizers could decentralize the administration of other climate areas, doing other dates, to affiliated leaders in those areas. Now that it’s been running several years and local organizers in other cities have some experience with it (and a lot of the info/training/promotional material has been established) it seems to me that the burden of the labor for running other dates could be taken on by partners. The goal being to keep it all under the CNC umbrella, because it’s a great concept already and has more recognizability and big-data use potential if it all stays together, but at the least not increasing, or maybe even decreasing, the workload on the original organizers.

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