Fwd: City Nature Challenge RESULTS

[Carrie Seltzer]

Hi everyone,

If you want to see highlights from the international organizers or dig more into the results of different cities, please see the email below and attached documents.

Best,

Carrie

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Alison Young <ayo...@calacademy.org>
Date: Mon, May 4, 2020 at 3:57 PM
Subject: City Nature Challenge RESULTS
To:
Cc: Lila Higgins <lhig...@nhm.org>, Amy Jaecker-Jones <ajae...@nhm.org>

Hi everyone,

Thanks again for such an amazing City Nature Challenge this year! Despite a global pandemic, we had thousands more people participate compared to last year, and even with 150,000 total observations compared to last year, we still ended up documenting more species! Attached you'll find a workbook of results - it's an Excel workbook so you can all have your own copy to sort, explore, create new sheets in... enjoy! If you're a previous CNC organizer, you'll notice we didn't sort the city numbers as many ways as in years previous - but since we're only announcing our collective results right now, we have time to look at the numbers in many other ways. Also attached is an infographic summarizing the collective results and highlighting some interesting finds, which you're welcome to share (it's attached both as a pdf and as a png).

Here are the collective results:

Observations: 815,258

Species: 32,500+, including more than 1,300 rare/endangered/threatened species

Observers: 41,165

Most-observed species globally: Common dandelion (Taraxacum officinale)

Highlights from around the U.S. and the world include a relatable fox squirrel trying to beat the heat in Los Angeles, a spotted harlequin snake midway through a meal in South Africa, an amethyst hairstreak butterfly—nearly extirpated in the United States—in Florida, a critically endangered harlequin frog in Panama, three sea-faring snails racing across a puddle in Calabasas, Honduras’s first observation of a rare orchid, a parasitic fungus erupting from a wasp in Tennessee, a stunning pitviper from the Philippines, and the first record in over 40 years of a white-spotted slimy salamander in Arlington County near Washington DC. 

The CNC also led to the biggest week on iNaturalist again!

Be sure to share results with your participants - creating a journal post in the "News" section of your project is an easy way to do it. You can even post the infographic in there! We also recommend highlighting some great finds in your city.

We'll send out an email soon with dates for our CNC wrap-up phone call. For now - relax, take a break, and once again - THANK YOU ALL!

Alison, Lila, and Amy

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Alison Young
Citizen Science
California Academy of Sciences
ayo...@calacademy.org
www.calacademy.org/citizen-science

@alisonkestrel

she/her/hers

--

Carrie E. Seltzer, Ph.D.