Achi news desk-
The four-day global challenge which is one of the biggest citizen science events on the planet kicks off on Friday, April 26-29.
Kaya Konopnicki, president of Nature Calgary, says people living in 48 countries are competing to see which city has the most urban biodiversity, including 40 Canadian cities.
“It’s a global competition so we’re competing against cities from all over the world,” he said. “But really what we’re competing against is Edmonton.
“We want to beat Edmonton and see if we can get more data than them,” he added. “We’ve had a lot of participants in recent years, we’ve exceeded over 10,000 checklists and we hope to do so again this year.”
Share and learn
Throughout the challenge, citizens connect with the natural world by sharing and learning about the plants, insects and animals around them.
Those observations are recorded through photographs and then uploaded to the iNaturealist app. That documentation is then shared around the world and used by researchers and scientists to track biodiversity.
“Maybe you find a bug in your backyard or inside your house or maybe you go out to a city park and take pictures of the flowers, the trees, the birds, ” said Konopnicki. “All of that is valid and can all be uploaded to the iNaturalist app.
“Even that little photo you take of that little fly or bee can really make a difference,” added Konopnicki. “That’s what they found with iNaturalist globally, is sometimes people document species that have never been seen before.”
Staggering numbers
In 2023 the City Nature Challenge saw nearly 70,000 people submit 1.8 million observations, documenting at least 60,000 species globally, this year organizers hope to record two million observations.
Greg Wagner is a biologist and volunteer caregiver for Frank Lake. He is one of the scientists using the data collected for the challenge.
“It’s good, cheap, free data that we don’t have to pay for,” he said. “Just people out doing things they enjoy and in the process of doing it, collecting tons of data.”
Wagner spends much of his time at Frank Lake and welcomes a group of birders who have joined the challenge to talk about the ecosystem that has been designated as an Important Bird Area (IBA) for two reasons.
“One, because there are large concentrations of birds going on here, things like Franklin’s gulls, this is one of the largest Franklin’s gull colonies in the world,” he said. “Secondly, there are many endangered or threatened species here, over a quarter of the birds that occur here are considered provincially, or federally endangered, they have some sort of designation.”
Useful data
Wagner says that all the data collected is being put to good use by him and other biologists.
“Documenting what is here promotes our ability to protect this area,” he said. “It makes a case that it should be preserved and also just a knowledge base that we could pass on and tell people.”
Doug Lawson is retired and describes himself as a novice birder. He says many Calgarians don’t know about Frank Lake and what a great wildlife resource it is.
“So we come out and we take pictures, not only of the birds and other mammals that we see, but all the plants and lichen and things like that,” he said. “All that information goes into a database that is easily available to people doing research.”
Lawson says the fact that it’s a challenge is fun and he’s hopeful more people will sign up to take part and record what they find.
“The more people with cameras, the more information you have and information is data and if we can get people to share in the iNaturalist app, that data is not lost, it is shared in everywhere around the world,” he said. “I don’t have the knowledge to be able to do that research but other people are doing it and helping makes you feel good, for sure.”
Back story
The City Nature Challenge was established by the California Academy of Sciences and the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History in 2016. Calgary has participated for six years and ranks well among other Canadian cities.
“We’re near the top and we have the most participants or the most times,” Konopnicki said. “That goes against cities like Toronto and Montreal, cities that have a lot more people and are a little further along in their spring and yet we still get a lot of people involved and a lot of observations .”
Konopnicki says Nature Calgary’s mandate is to educate people and get them to record what they see everywhere, not just in their own backyard, but around their neighborhoods and areas across the province.
Learn more about the City Nature Challenge here: https://www.citynatureyyc.ca/
