Notice from the global CNC organizers

2019-04-30
Hello fabulous City Nature Challenge organizers!

Thanks for an incredible four days of observing our local nature! Including the cities that didn't use iNaturalist, all together we've uploaded over 800,000 observations of close to 27,000 species! More than 32,000 people participated, which is absolutely amazing.

So what's next? Well, we're done taking pictures, but there are still quite a few things that can be done before the challenge is officially over:

Uploading: If participants have a backlog of photos that they haven't uploaded yet, they can keep uploading their observations through Sunday, May 5. Of course, these observations must have been taken during the observing window of April 26 - 29 and made within your CNC place boundary to count - but as long as they meet those two requirements, they will be added to your CNC project.

Identifying: The main reason we have a week between the ending of making observations and announcing the results is so that people have time to identify observations! You can learn more about best practices of making observations here: https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/getting+started#identify

You can see which observations still need IDs by clicking the "Observations" tab in your project and then clicking the Identify button.

Once you're on the identify page, you can filter for particular taxa (using the "species" box or using the taxon buttons in the filters) if you'd like (e.g., birds, plants, grasses, lizards). You can also click the "unknown" button in the filters to see all the observations that were uploaded with no ID at all. For these unknowns, if you don't know the species it's still useful to add a coarse ID like "plants" or "grasses" or "reptiles" so that the people who know these taxa can find these observations more easily to identify them.

A big part of identifying is also helping us mark observations of organisms that are clearly captive or cultivated as such. If you see a human-planted plant or an animal that's in a zoo or aquarium, PLEASE mark these observations Captive / Cultivated (if you're in the identify page) or click the thumbs down for "Organism is wild" in the Data Quality Assessment section if you're on the observation page:

Also: if you see an observation where you think the photograph is inappropriate or not taken by the observer (e.g., they found the photo somewhere on the internet), please read what to do here: https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/help#inappropriate

Results: Whatever your numbers are as of 9am YOUR TIME on Monday, May 6 will be your results! We will send you all an email once we have results compiled and ready to present - this will most likely be around 3pm Pacific Time on Monday May 6. It would be great if you shared out results in your City Nature Challenge project - use the News feature! Especially if you tailored some results for your city, like highlighting great finds or how many species were new to your place on iNaturalist.

Thanks,
Alison, Lila, & Amy

Posted on May 5, 2019 03:17 PM by mkkennedy