Diario de kestrel

Hey SF Bay Area! AMAZING job over the last 4 days going out and making observations! It's truly incredible what we can accomplish when we all work together, and not only did 1472 of us here in the Bay Area make 38,000 observations of 3100 species (so far!), but all together 16,000 people participated in making 385,000 observations of 16,500 species (so far!) around the world for the City Nature Challenge. So incredible.

So what's next? Well, we know many people were incredibly busy making observations Friday-Monday, and need some time to get them uploaded. We also know it takes time to get eyes on all these observations to try to confirm or refine the IDs. So, from now until 9am, Friday May 4, you should:

1. Upload all your observations! As long as they were made April 27-30, you can upload them now and they'll still count for the City Nature Challenge.
2. Help ID observations! Just like anyone can make observations, anyone can help with identifying observations. Here are all the observations made in the SF Bay Area for the City Nature Challenge that are not yet research grade! If you have some expertise or some naturalist know-how, feel free to help confirm IDs, correct mis-IDs, or try to take general IDs (e.g., "plants") down to more refined IDs (e.g., "California Poppy").

Our numbers will be pulled as final results at 9am this Friday, and results for the City Nature Challenge will be announced early afternoon that day!

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:

Congratulations to us, Bay Area - for the first time ever, we won the City Nature Challenge! And we won in high fashion, taking first for number of observations, species, and participants!

Diving deeper into the results for the Bay Area, 94% of observations submitted were verifiable, meaning that they had both a photo or sound AND were not marked captive or cultivated. By the time the numbers were pulled at 9 a.m. this morning, 50% of those observations had made it to Research Grade - a big thank you to our identifiers!!! Compared to last year's City Nature Challenge, even though this year's was one day shorter, we made almost double the observations we did last year, found close to 1000 more species, and had 2.5 times more people participate this year!

Congratulations to our top observer AND species-finder, @sea-kangaroo! @dpom and @damontighe also made it onto the top 5 for both lists. Our other top observers were @lemurdillo, @merav, and @wbsimey, and on the rest of the list for finding the most species are @catchang, @mrchasse, and @leftcoastnaturalist. We also want to thank our top identifiers: @graysquirrel made almost 3000 IDs, with @farinosa close behind with nearly 2000 IDs! @catchang, @boschniakia, @kueda, and @dshell all made over 1000 IDs - amazing! Big thanks to all of them (we'll be in touch about prizes) and equally big thanks to EVERYONE who got out and made observations and helped with identifying observations for the SF Bay Area City Nature Challenge this year!

And importantly, a HUGE THANK YOU to all of the people and organizations who held events in the Bay Area for this year's City Nature Challenge - we were able to offer more than 20 public events, where people could learn how to use iNaturalist, meet other people, and document a ton of species together. Building our local naturalist community is extremely important to us and is one of the main goals of the City Nature Challenge, so thanks to everyone who helped out, and a big WELCOME to all of the people new to iNaturalist who jumped in this year for the City Nature Challenge!

Looking at the impact overall, 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

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...
All together 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!
City with highest percentage of verifiable 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

Hi folks,

You're tagged in this journal post because you were one of the top ten observers, species-finders, and/or identifiers (some of you are all three!) for the SF Bay Area City Nature Challenge! Congratulations, and thank you so much for your enthusiasm, time, and energy you invested in the CNC.

We'd like to recognize your contributions, and want to do something that you'd personally enjoy. So - we've thought of a few different ideas - you can pick one that you're interested in or give us other suggestions to entertain. Hopefully if some of you pick the same things, we can do them as a group - we'd love to get to know some of you better and meet those of you we don't personally know yet!

Prizes:
A tour of some of the Academy's research collections
A tidepooling trip with Rebecca (@rebeccafay) and me (both seasoned nudibranch-finders, and marine biologists to boot!)
Admission to NightLife at the Academy
Admission to the Academy
Beautiful flat Nature in the City maps, perfect for hanging on a wall - or we can give you a folded one if you'd prefer it
A hike some place cool together?
Something else??? - especially if you work at the Academy!

Let us know what you'd be interested in, and we can start scheming some group get-togethers or outings!

@graysquirrel @farinosa @boschniakia @catchang @kueda @dshell @jlmartin @hfb @dpom @gyrrlfalcon @sea-kangaroo @lemurdillo @merav @wbsimey @damontighe @lgottlieb @mrchasse @leftcoastnaturalist @bhill @barry_thomson