Claire O'Neill
Hello CNC Boston Area Participating Organizations.
The City Nature Challenge (CNC) is back for 2021. The Boston Area will be once again participating in the global effort to document urban biodiversity. You, your family, and your organization can work together with our local biodiversity lovers by making observations from April 30 - May 3 and/or helping to identify observations from May 4 - May 9, 2021. We will once again be documenting biodiversity within the I-495 corridor, out to Stellwagen Bank, and include Cape Cod and islands. We are reaching out today to you as an organization who has expressed interest in one of our past CNC events or a potential new organization.
Ready to join as a participating organization? Please register your organization with us by completing this google form by February 1st to let us know you are participating. Here are a few examples of how you can become a participating organizations in the 2021 CNC in the Boston Area:
Spread the word! Send out information about the CNC to your member or volunteer lists.
Plan an event or incorporate the CNC into your existing events. Encourage involvement virtually or in safe ways as outlined by your organization respecting local health guidelines.
Help make IDs during the observation (April 30- May 3) and the identification periods (May 4 - May 9). The more observations we identify to species level, the bigger our tally!
Make use of the data collected by the CNC to help your conservation, management or research efforts.
If you’re an educator (formal or informal) let us help you get youth involved with our Education Toolkit! This includes NGSS-aligned pre-, during, and post-event materials.
While the global pandemic in 2020 did lead us to refocus our approach to documenting urban biodiversity - together we sure did see a lot of species! We are so very grateful to our community of iNat’ters who take the time to connect with one another through our interest in nature. Thanks to your efforts documenting biodiversity ‘where you are’ in 2020 - we recorded 15,347 observations of 1,702 species by 1,069 observers. While the total number of observations went down from 2019, we documented about 200 additional species and still had over 1,000 members of our local community connecting to nature.
For 2021, we will build on the success of a place-based focus to document biodiversity and encourage you to keep it local and safe! Go slow and steady to explore in detail the biodiversity near you. We will continue to use iNaturalist to record observations and tally results. However you participate we want to support your efforts. We have flyers, iNaturalist how-to handouts and training, science quests to delve deeper, and an Education Toolkit to help you engage others. We have a website (2021 update coming soon, but lots of good resources are still there).
Join the 2021 Boston Area iNaturalist project today and stay tuned for more information. If you have any concerns or suggestions for this year, please contact us. We look forward to hearing from and working with you! Please fill out the google form to register as a participating organization as soon as you can! Feel free to reach out directly to me or any member of the steering committee (cc'd on this message) with questions.
Otherwise be well, keep an eye on the natural world, and share your observations on iNat!
The 2021 CNC Steering Committee
Colleen Hitchcock, Brandeis University
Claire O’Neill, Earthwise Aware
Rob Stevenson, University of Massachusetts Boston
John Anderson, Zoo New England
Peter Burn, Suffolk University
Pam DiBona, MassBays National Estuary Partnership
Stan Rullman and Mark Chandler, Earthwatch Institute
