City Nature Challenge
/
The 2024 City Nature Challenge takes place in 2 parts
April 26 – April 29, 2024, Taking pictures of wild plants and animals.
April 30 – May 5, 2024, Identifying what was found.
Participating is easy: just use iNaturalist to make and share observations of wild plants and animals in any of the nine Bay Area counties between April 28 and May 1, 2023
. Be sure to check back here as well for information about City Nature Challenge events happening throughout the Bay Area.
Step 1: Find Wildlife
It can be any plant, animal, or any other evidence of life found in your city.
Take a picture of what you find. Be sure to note the location of the critter or plant.
Step 3: Share
Share your observations through iNaturalist or your city’s chosen platform.
ABOUT
Started in 2016 for the first-ever Citizen Science Day, the citizen science teams at Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and California Academy of Sciences dreamed up the City Nature Challenge as a fun way to capitalize on their home cities’ friendly rivalry and hold a citizen science event around urban biodiversity. The first City Nature Challenge was an eight-day competition between Los Angeles and San Francisco, engaging residents and visitors in documenting nature to better understand urban biodiversity. Over 20,000 observations were made by more than 1000 people in a one-week period, cataloging approximately 1600 species in each location, including new records for both areas. During the 2016 CNC, we heard so much excitement and interest from people in other cities that we decided we couldn’t keep to the fun just to ourselves. In 2017 the City Nature Challenge went national, and in 2018, the CNC became an international event!
