The CNC organizers have asked local CNC leaders to highlight notable observations from their CNC. In today’s planning meeting, I mentioned the The Edges of (all) Life storymap which is documenting the northern most and southern most observation of certain organisms in North and Central America. Check out the Records Near You tab and see if any of your CNC’s observation are more southerly/northerly that the current record. Be sure to let Lila, Allison, Sam and team know as well as the Eo(a)L project staff as the story map does not automatically update (I don’t think)
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What a great project and idea! I found a couple near me which were observed a couple years ago - I’m going to check them out to see if they’re still there or if they’ve spread further!
This is a really cool project, but often I’ve found that species observations outside of their native range are wrongly identified, even though they are sometimes research grade. Also many such observations should be casual because they’re cultivated, but there’s no way of knowing if something is cultivated or not afterward by just looking at a photo of the specimen.
An example: I live near what was once the northernmost wild stand of American persimmon, Diospyros virginiana. There is one tree left there now after the area was heavily developed. I wrote about it here and here is the iNat observation. There are however several research grade observations further north that are in fact cultivated trees (I’ve visited a few of them and verified this) so in this case the furthest north data is incorrect because of cultivated trees marked as research grade.
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Also, what is a CNC?
Never mind, saw that it stands for City Nature Challenge!