City Nature Challenge 2018's Boletim

This year's City Nature Challenge was AMAZING! Almost 70 cities around the world, all mobilizing their residents and visitors to go out and find and document their local nature. The energy and enthusiasm for the City Nature Challenge was once again amazing- watching hundreds of thousands of observations flow in from around the world was truly inspiring. Our collective impact was obvious and incredible - we also gave iNaturalist its biggest 4 days in a row EVER!

Here are the results of the City Nature Challenge (as of 9:00 a.m., May 4 in each city’s time zone):
All 68 cities together:
Observations: 441,888
People: 17,329

All 63 cities using iNaturalist:
Observations: 423,845
Species: 18,116
People: 16,544

We also made 4,075 Research Grade observations of 599 rare, endangered, and threatened species globally, and added over 100 new species that had not previously been recorded on iNaturalist EVER!

Congratulations to our top five observers, species-finders, and identifiers across ALL the City Nature Challenge cities:
Observers: @krentan, @thary, @danielatha, @affan1990, @ecologist
Species-finders: @anewman, @rcurtis, @finatic, @nanofishology, @sambiology
Identifiers: @jrebman, @srall, @pihlaviita, @connlindajo, @sambiology
Big shout out to @jrebman for making over 10,000 identification!!

This year it was a sweep, with the San Francisco Bay Area winning in all three categories.
Most observations: 41,737
Most species found: 3,211
Most participants: 1,532

Here's the top five in each category:

Observations
San Francisco Bay Area: 41,737
Dallas/Fort Worth Area: 34,218
San Diego County: 33,448
Klang Valley / Greater Kuala Lumpur: 25,287
Washington- D.C. Metro Area: 22,800

Species
San Francisco Bay Area: 3,211
Houston Area: 3,088
San Diego County: 2,946
Hong Kong SAR: 2,932
Dallas/Fort Worth Area: 2,560

People
San Francisco Bay Area: 1,532
San Diego County: 1,211
Boston: 992
Washington- D.C. Metro Area: 872
Los Angeles County: 855

...and some more results...
City with highest percentage of verifiable (has evidence of the organism and is not marked captive or cultivated) observations: Tulsa, Oklahoma with 98.9%
City with highest percentage of verifiable observations making it to Research Grade: Cádiz, Spain with 70.5%
City that added the most new species to their region on iNaturalist through the City Nature Challenge: Kuala Lumpur (Klang Valley), Malaysia with 1392 new species documented on iNaturalist
City that added the most new iNaturalist participants to their region through the City Nature Challenge: San Diego, California with 733 new observers added during the City Nature Challenge

Thanks again to everyone who participated in the City Nature Challenge this year! And stay tuned for next year, when the City Nature Challenge hopefully makes it to all seven continents--anyone got friends in Africa or Oceania who want to organize in 2019?

After 4 days of intense observation-making, we've moved on to the uploading & identifying portion of the City Nature Challenge. The identifying is something that EVERYONE can help with, whether or not your city participated in the City Nature Challenge! There are many ways to help with IDs, making it easy for anyone to join in:

1. There are over 43,000 observations with no ID at all. Even if you don't know much about identifying organisms down to species, with these observations it's HUGELY helpful to go through and do high-level classifications, e.g., "plants" or "lizards" or "birds" so that the people who do know these groups of organisms can more easily find these observations and ID them.
2. More than half of the observations submitted for the City Nature Challenge still need help with IDs! You can help by confirming IDs that have already been made, refining IDs from general (e.g. "plants") to more specific (e.g. "red maple"), and correcting mis-identifications. You can filter these observations to taxa you're familiar with in places that you know - see the video below.
3. As you're going through observations, you can also help by marking observations as captive/cultivated if it's obvious that it's a photo of a pet or a captive animal (e.g., animals in zoos or aquaria), or a plant that has been planted and is being taken care of (e.g., plants in pots or a garden bed).

Here's a short video on how to use the identify page: