City Nature Challenge L.A. vs S.F. April 14 - April 21, 2016
From deserts, crowded cities, and rugged coastlines to the farmlands of the Central Valley, California encompasses some of the most diverse natural habitats on the planet. California is part of a global biodiversity hotspot (the California Floristic Province) with plants and animals in abundance, many found nowhere else on Earth. This diversity drives the beauty of our home state, and provides the food and healthy ecosystems that contribute to human health and well being. This collective richness provides the quality of life Californians treasure.
Unfortunately, the state’s spectacular biodiversity is seriously threatened: at least 75% of the original habitat has already been lost. It is imperative to develop a new baseline of California biodiversity and to monitor how exactly change is accelerating. However, scientists alone cannot thoroughly monitor biodiversity. We need everyone - residents of California, visitors to California, adults, kids, friends, and families - to share the nature they find everywhere - in your backyard, in your schoolyard, in your favorite parks, and growing in the cracks in the sidewalk - to help build a comprehensive picture of biodiversity in California.
What better way to help create a baseline of California biodiversity than to capitalize on the friendly rivalry between San Francisco and Los Angeles and engage in a biodiversity competition? Centered around National Citizen Science Day and Earth Day, the California Academy of Sciences and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County are asking residents of and visitors to the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles County to explore nature all around them and document the species they find using iNaturalist. At the end of the week, we’ll compare stats like total number of species found, total number of observations, and total number of observers to find out who comes out on top: Los Angeles or San Francisco!
Comentários
I don't know you guys, going by the same period last year in LA and in SF, I'd say you're going to have to step up your game. Then again, the Bay Area is 1.7x bigger than LA county (at least according to iNat), so maybe it's not a fair fight? You'd have something roughly equivalent if you included LA, Orange, and San Diego counties.
Yeah a serious effort from SF would easily beat LA. It'll take a lot more effort from our side to get anywhere near.
We'll see... Hopefully we can rally more people to compete in L.A. versus last year. Plus we will be accepting submissions not just direct uploads to iNat, but through email (nature@nhm.org) and social media (#NatureinLA on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter).
It's the power users race rather than number of users haha. 100 users from LA won't beat 4 users from SF that upload 50-100+ observations an outing.
That does seem unfair. If it's strictly by county seems like at least Orange County should count. (Or maybe this is sign that mid-April is a great time to turncoat visit southern California family.)
The naturalist presence is still much greater in the north of CA. But we'll at least make sure you can't sit on your backside every day :)
We probably have more species here in LA because of the habitat converging, but they are scattered, whereas in SF most of the diversity is close together and more easily accessible.
We did consider geographical size, as well as population size (L.A. has more people). And the competition will be judged not just by total number of observations, but also by number of species, and number of people. Plus we have a few tricks up our sleeve to help promote the challenge in L.A. so fingers crossed we can come out ahead despite having a few challenges.
And I am really happy that you all are taking this seriously. Let's hope others will too!
Cheers!
yeah the Bay Area is pretty much cheating as usual :) Putting placse likle Dixon and all of Marin in the bay area is kinda a stretch, by that logic all of Ventura, Santa Barbara, and Orange counties should be included in the LA version, and maybe western San Bernardino and Riverside counties as well. Also phenology peaks later in SF, and the time period 'conveniently' matches the SF floristic peak.
So what I am saying is it's totally on. I won't be in the area, so I am mostly talk, but I won't be providing any IDs for that bloated 'bay area' boundary during that week :)
on a related note if LA wants to have a chance in the plant category someone has GOT to get up to the Liebre Mountain area. An absolute must. All kinds of stuff up there that is more indicative of nor-cal. Go re-fidn my oregon oak observation, also grey pine, black oak, blue oak, and who knows how many tiny plants. And the flora will be closer to peak up there. Need a croudsourced effort to send @silversea_starsong up there.
@charlie, your best strategy is to revert all the SF plants to family or genus so they don't get the "species tick"!
Get me a driver and we're set :)
if you were in the bay area they could send you a google self driving car
We're watching this competition with interest from downunder here in New Zealand. It's odd to think of LA being the underdog, but I can see you're up against some stiff competition. Go LA!
(I'm curious to hear about how much uptake you get from the email and social media submissions, and how you're sidestepping the massive data wrangling mess of dealing with unformatted messages.)
Like I said before, the big difference is most biodiversity in SF is together and easily accessible. Much of the equivalent biodiversity in LA is somewhat far afield, and not near urban or rural areas. In the end LA probably has far more species than SF, except they are more scattered.
It is awesome to see the participation, but we need at least a couple of people covering some places that are further away from the city itself. There are areas with an easy 100-200 species which will all be completely missed if no one goes out that way.
For those of you who are monitoring these projects and adding IDs, I just want to share a link that will help weed out some of the more obvious misidentifications: here's how you view a list of all taxa observed in a project:
http://www.inaturalist.org/observations/taxa?projects[]=6365&verifiable=any
You can do basically the same thing in the observations search, but this one is sorted taxonomically and I find it to be an easier way to notice obvious outliers. It doesn't help noticing observations that are misidentified as common species, though. If you want to help keep us honest up north, here's the same link for the SF observations:
http://www.inaturalist.org/observations/taxa?projects[]=6345&verifiable=any
Thanks Ken-Ichi! It's fun to see all those species! I've been helping some with ID of the LA side, as much as our little baby will give me time to do between the diaper changes :) Looks like SF will be able to win most likely but LA sure has a lot of good stuff. I am thinking sometime we should go Vermont VS SF. If we did it in July we might have a chance :) Probably not but would be fun. Maybe next year.
I'm enjoying another statistic: species observed per participant. To me, that's mighty important -- each participant is recognizing the biodiversity in the environment -- urban or rural. :)
As of day 4, SF participants are averaging 3.4 species, and LA participants are averaging 4.36 species. Great stuff!
This really is a fun contest. It has translated really well to traditional media and to the general public since people understand a rivalry and a contest, but not always concepts such as biodiversity or citizen science.
This "City Nature Challenge" really can grow in the future. I can see lots of cities participating next year.
I still think L.A. can pull it out, or even if we don't win regarding most observations, we may get most species, and/or most participants. Regardless, we are showing that each city has biodiversity (despite urbanization) and hopefully it will translate that this biodiversity is something worth protecting and enhancing.
BeatSF #CitizenScience #CityNatureChallenge
-Richard
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