Staff from FSC Epping Forest and FSC London took part in City Nature Challenge last weekend. City Nature Challenge London 2019 was led by the Natural History Museum in partnership with the Royal Parks, University College London, the Field Studies Council and London Environmental Educators Forum, and involved a number of events across the city, as well as encouraging members of the public to take pictures in their own garden.
“Starting in 2016 by citizen science staff at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (Lila Higgins) and California Academy of Sciences (Alison Young). The City Nature Challenge is an international effort for people to find and document plants and wildlife in cities across the globe. It’s a bioblitz-style competition where cities are in a contest against each other to see who can make the most observations of nature, who can find the most species, and who can engage the most people”.
City Nature Challenge
In 2017 CNC went National, and in 2018 international. In 2019, 150 cities across the globe took part. Taking part was easy, all we needed to do was download iNaturalist, sign in and then take and upload photos. Using the locations from the uploads, all records made within the defined geographic boundary were registered as part of the project. By joining the project we could see more details. By the end of the weekend the UK results were:
These contributed to a current total of 807,794 observations, 27,685 species and 31,758 observers across the globe. See the overview here.
The event is not quite over – now comes the challenging part of confirming the identification of those observations. All observations were made on iNaturalist and we have until Sunday 5th May to check, verify and confirm species identifications. If you would like to get involved, please log in, look up “City Nature Challenge London 2019” and help to identify/confirm identification of the observations. It is a reasonably quick process, if the image is good!
How about an “FSC Nature Challenge”? How many species and observations can we make in our centre grounds over an agreed week. If you are up for the challenge, contact staff at FSC Epping Forest and FSC London and we can work out the details!