City Nature Challenge: Australia's 2nd Year
The City Nature Challenge is back for 2021, with Australian cities back for their second year. The City Nature Challenge has been running since 2016 when it was started as a competition between Los Angeles and San Francisco to record urban biodiversity using the iNaturalist platform. During a 7-day period, over 20,000 observations were made of 2500 species by over 1,000 participants. In 2017 the number of cities involved grew to 16, in 2018 it grew to 68 cities from various countries. 159 cities participated in 2019 and last year 244 cities around the world took part. The result was 41,000 participants contributing 815,000 observations from over 32,000 species around the world. It was expect that over 1 million observations would be uploaded in 2020, but the pandemic put a damper on that. This year however, that goal is back on the table.
This year 5 Australian cities are participating in the challenge using the iNaturalist platform.
- Greater Adelaide
- Geelong
- Melbourne Eastern Metropolitan Area (New for 2021)
- Sydney
- Redland City
The challenge will run for 4 days from Friday April 30th through to Monday May 3rd inclusive. Any observation taken during this time will be included in the challenge results. Following this, from May 4th through to May 9th is the identification period. This time is provided to allow participants to identify as many species as possible from the 4 day challenge period. The challenge is to see which cities can make the most observations, record the most species and engage the most people.
For South Australian residents in and around Greater Adelaide, the City Nature Challenge 2021: Greater Adelaide is the project to join. The area included is the same as for 2020 and extends (following local government area boundaries) from the Murray River mouth, across Lake Alexandrina, up the river, around Murray Bridge, across toward Mount Torrens, up past Kapunda, across to the north of Thompson Beach and along the coast back to the Murray River mouth. This year there is also a specific project for those who wish to make observations outside the registered city areas, the City Nature Challenge 2021: Global Project.
April has been the challenge month since the City Nature Challenge began as this coincides with the Northern Hemisphere Spring. Unfortunately for us this means the challenge will occur in Autumn and we will miss out of recording the tremendous emergence of life in our Spring. (We'll need to wait for the Great Southern Bioblitz for that). However this shouldn't dissuade us, as Cape Town, South Africa frequently takes out top spot in the challenge, showing that it doesn't need to be Springtime to discover your local biodiversity.
So get started by signing up to the Greater Adelaide or Global projects, and join the City Nature Challenge Umbrella Project to see how each city fares as the challenge progresses.
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