One idea that came to mind is a website that would facilitate city-versus-city challenges in the spirit of the very first CNC between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Cities could be listed with their hemisphere, (primary?) climate type, and population to make it easier to find opponents, then the two organizing committees could iron out the details of when the challenge will take place. Instead of a mass free-for-all of everyone observing nature and seeing who ends up on top that approach might create a more engaging experience of one community against another where participants might learn a little more about their rival’s geography and wildlife.
Taking that one step further, perhaps there could be points awarded both for participating and for ‘winning’ a challenge with a leaderboard showing how well cities have done globally, regionally, and versus cities with a similar climate type or population.
Could be kind of fun to take advantage of present ‘sister city’ / ‘twinned city’ relationships as well by having nature challenges between just the two during a period that suits them both.
yeah i think this would be really fun. Not sure if it’s what the existing CnC organizers want or are interested in but I think it would be neat one way or another.
Heat also tends to coincide with biodiversity. If the goal is maximizing this, then participants will have to adapt accordingly. Chicago is stiflingly, meltingly hot in the summertime, but I’d still advocate for this event to be held mid-July to August. Water bottles and common sense belong in the toolkit of every naturalist. The real problem, as it relates to this biodiversity challenge, is not that the chilly air requires me to grudgingly break out my winter coat and knit cap, but, rather, that I have nothing to observe aside from a few sprouting plants and a smattering of common early season animals.
In my experience February would probably be best for the deep south in the United States.
Here in Florida we are pretty used to dealing with the heat and humidity, but May to September are pretty unbearable down in Miami. South Florida in general experiences some intense heat, humidity, and pretty impressive storms that roll through every day between approximately 2 and 4pm (we are often the lightning capital of the United States after all) starting in May until September. Getting ahead of this bad weather would be preferred. April is currently ok for us, but as @thatkazakhbirder said, scheduling too far into May would not be optimal for the Southern United States.
However, I 100% understand the amount of work that goes into organizing an event like this and I appreciate how much work you guys do @kestrel. If coordinating multiple big CNC events just isn’t possible right now, then April is perfectly ok for us. In my experience Floridians are pretty tough when it comes to dealing with heat and humidity .
Personally due to current projects and the weather in my area I haven’t been able to contribute as I would like to the CNC this year so to make up for it I plan to spend a few days in about a month hammering out a ton of obs for fun!
I would suggest this as a way to “make up” for an inability to participate because of the weather, I know it isn’t exactly the same since there is no competition, but hey any data is good data right?
I really do feel that the benefit of CNC is in the people connections it makes. I wasn’t able to make our city entry, but from afar I have been helping where I can with some IDs and new user support, and even that has been fantastic for forming new relationships and strengthening existing.
I’m not sure there will be any difference in terms of having staggered dates. All that will happen then is the complaints will shift to ‘city x can’t compete with city y, because city y has greater biodiversity and available species, so let’s make it based on percentage of your checklist found’, or something similar.
Assuming it is safe, and there is one in your area, just go out and enjoy some time outside.
People will complain about ‘fairness’ regardless (it’s been tilted towards sf from LA from the start but LA still won the first one) but the main purposes of staggering it would be so that it’s actually enjoyable and productive (like, there are more than zero flowering plants and leps for instance) and it would spread out the server load. Though understandably it doesn’t look like the people who run CnC can make it an all year though so if we want it we have to makeit ourselves and i don’t see too many people volunteering to do that either. That’s ok, we still have lots of summer bioblitzes and such.
Enjoyment is in the eye of the beholder, for some it is flowering plants, for other it is trees, or migrating birds, or lichen. There’s always something to see out there.
Yeah but it’s not the cold I’m talking it’s the mud… January would be better honestly. anyhow, yes any time of year you might find something neat but if you try to organize an event this time of year people will just laugh.
I’m not gonna pretend it’s something it’s not. But it’s bigger than the servers can handle anyway. We don’t need to add to it.
How so? Still seems very CNC-related to me. The last few posts out of context may sound just like people chatting about where they’ve lived, but the background is all about whether it’s possible to find a single spot in the year that maximizes diversity without severely suppressing turnout.
And joe_fish, I fully understand that your main point was about biodiversity, but felt the need to respond to your statement that people in Texas “can’t handle” the heat of a normal summer day and aren’t aware that temperatures fluctuate diurnally. That was just unnecessarily hostile, like the title of the thread. There are good ideas coming out for scaling this kind of event worldwide, but we don’t need sweeping attacks on other regions in order to get there.
I agree! It would be fantastic to align CNC with the snowbird migrations we get down here in Florida. That would be both interesting and very valuable data.
In response to the comment about the dates in regard to Cape Town, Cape Town is leading the CNC right now in species and observations, so while maybe those dates aren’t ideal, it seemed to work out okay. http://citynaturechallenge.org/leaderbaord-2019/
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