Join the City Nature Challenge Now!

Select from many local events on April 27–30 and sign up. For the list of local events and sign-up information, click: HERE

By Louis Harrell, Caroline Haynes, and Phil Klingelhofer

What is the City Nature Challenge?

Mark your calendars for April 27-30 to participate in the City Nature Challenge. What started out as a friendly competition between Los Angeles and San Francisco in 2016 to document urban nature using iNaturalist, expanded to 15 cities in 2017, and is going global in 2018 with over 65 cities participating on five continents. ARMN is helping to organize participation in the City Nature Challenge DC, encompassing the entire DC metro area, including 14 counties in Virginia, 5 counties in Maryland, and Jefferson County in West Virginia.

ARMN members and others participated in the challenge last year and the DC area came in 7^th behind Raleigh, N.C.  This year, Boston has challenged DC, and we’re hoping to improve our record.

Who can participate and where?

You, your friends, their friends, and families are all invited to become citizen scientists and participate in an observation event; all ages and levels of expertise are welcome!

Folks may participate anywhere in the metropolitan area.  Each group will have experienced leaders to show you what to do. The more eyes on the ground and up in the sky the better! Join the fun, and contribute to the collection of data, to see which metropolitan area (hopefully, OURS!) can engage the most participants, make the most observations and identify the most species.

How to learn more and sign up.

There are a lot of ways to get more information and join the challenge:

• To link to the iNaturalist app (where the information is recorded) and join the project, click: https://www.inaturalist.org/
• For general information about the DC City Nature Challenge, click: https://citynaturechallengedc.wordpress.com/. Click on the Events page and scroll down to find area locations in which to participate, and then click the “Register” link. You may also go to the Map and click on various push pins to pick a particular event.
• Need to learn how to use iNaturalist? Here are online tutorials: https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/video+tutorials

The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History will be hosting an event on Monday, April 30 at 6:30 pm with taxonomic experts to help ID the findings. For details and registration, click: http://go.si.edu/site/Calendar?id=102202&view=Detail&s_src=nmnh_er&s_subsrc=midmo_1803_text.