In Awe, Inspired, and In Admiration

At the start of planning for this year's City Nature Challenge six months ago, our driving vision was for this event to be more inclusive at the community level, both geographically and demographically. In other words, we hoped for more people-diversity to complement the biodiversity of our county. Both deserve to be valued and championed, and citizen science is the perfect forum for accomplishing this.

By comparing the maps of last year's CNC observations with this year's, and by taking note of the greater number of collaborations, individual observers, and the widening span of accessible citizen science opportunities you have shared for this event, we are blown away by what we see.

We have not only made great strides in improving our citizen science for all approach, but we have watched all of our numbers rise in the process.

We'll have a more official global results announcement shortly, but for the time being, we stand at #17 for the global observation tally.

We are absolutely in awe, inspired, and in admiration of you for your contributions and our county's great improvement this year!

In fact, we would not necessarily be any happier if we had a higher standing given that our project stands on the more rigorous research side of the spectrum (i.e., we do not include Casual observations, as some of the higher-standing projects do) and we do not require anyone to participate in this project (also, which some projects require of their participants).

Two last notes:

Perhaps of interest is this iNaturalist Forum conversation about the numbers we see coming from La Paz: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/city-nature-challenge-why-la-paz/51026.

Also, it's worth mentioning that our closest competitors, South Florida, included Casual observations in their project, of which they had 806. Our project only includes Research Grade and Needs ID observations. Taking this into account, as of right now, San Diego County has actually made about 500 more observations within these two categories.

Final results will be announced soon!

Posted on May 6, 2024 03:40 PM by lmarun