Diario del proyecto City Nature Challenge 2024: Calgary Metropolitan Region

Great work on everyone's observations over the weekend! We have surpassed our goal of 10K observations (by a long-shot) and the numbers continue to grow. The deadline to post all of your observations is Midnight May 5. It's a bit of a "soft" deadline as the CNC organizers will be pulling all of the numbers by 9am on May 6. Probably in the afternoon the global results will be announced and we will consider the event complete!

One last thing I would like to ask of all of you is that you hit the heart button for any great posts you come across. A great post might be an interesting find, a beautiful photo, or something that has some pizazz to it! This will boost them to the top of our project page which I can then relay to the global organizers for a chance that they may be featured in the results package!

I also want to thank all of the partner organizations and all of the event participants we had over the weekend. Several of the events had over 25 people which was great to see! Not everyone was sharing photos to iNaturalist (and that's totally okay) but the actual number of participants we see on our project page probably fall short of the total number of people who were out engaging with nature over the four days. I'll see if I can tally up all of the event participant numbers just to see how we did!

Thank you everyone and best of luck with identifications and getting all of your observations posted over the next 3 days!

Matt

Good Luck everyone this weekend! Day 1 has some flurries in the morning and it was a bit cold on the hands trying to navigate the cameras. We are doing well so far in terms of observations (~2300 at the time of this post). I feel optimistic that we could get close to the 10K mark this weekend but it's always a soft guess as I have no idea how many people are sitting on un-uploaded observations. Do you have a strategy for uploading your observations or just get em up when you can? During the four days, I will only have enough time to post my phone photos. I will geotag and upload all of my camera shots before May 5.

Best of luck on days 2-4 and go hard!

Matt

Hello everyone,
You are the top iNaturalist observers within the Calgary region and I am putting out a call for you to participate in the Calgary City Nature Challenge 2024 (April 26-29). We "diehard" iNatters refer to this elite group as the Power Users of Calgary. With 5,968 contributors you represent the top 2% of our contributions in the area. Kudos to you for your elite status!

This year City Nature Challenge (CNC) will have nearly 700 cities competing and collaborating worldwide. There are 49 cities across Canada participating and I really would like us to make it to the top! We have a really good chance here in Calgary to be the top Canadian city for observations (and potentially participation). I would be very pleased if we made into the top 100 cities worldwide for any of the three categories:
1) Number of observations
2) Number of species
3) Number of participants

Over the past five years, CNC has contributed 32,700 observations to our region. It has always been my goal of achieving a minimum of 10K observations during the CNC but have struggled to really recruit new participants that are willing to submit lots of observations.

If each of us posted a minimum of 100 observations (or 25 observations each day), we could easily make it happen! Of course, please don't limit yourself to only 100 if you feel like you can do more! If we locked in 15,000 posts during CNC we would be in the top 30 cities around the world which would be a huge feat!

My personal record for CNC is 1612 but it was no easy take. I was spending around 10 hours a day a visiting as many parks as possible. I would burn through at least 3 full batteries a day and duplicating any observations I could. This year, due to time and scheduling conflicts, I don't think I'll be able to achieve anywhere that amount. However, with your help I am certain we can get close to the goal! I would be willing to provide someone with a gift card out for dinner if they can break the 2000 observation mark, simply for their dedication and effort! If it happens, I'll send you a private message after the event to sort things out.

So just as a quick recap for the "rules" of CNC 2024:

1) Observations must be made (photos taken or audio recorded) April 26-29
2) The deadline to submit observations is midnight May 5
3) The global and national results will be posted May 6

Other:
If you join the project, please select the "trust with hidden coordinates" button. This allows for me to analyze the results including obscured locations. If you don't feel comfortable doing this, please avoid obscuring observations unless they are at your personal residence or the species is highly sensitive (aka owls) I assure you nobody cares which park you visited, or which street you walked along to make your observations so please only use the obscure function when it is really needed. When we get tons of obscured observations, the map is more or less useless as the randomized area covers the entire city (and there is no real way to exclude these from the analysis without losing all of the observations).

Of course, please encourage your friends, family, and colleagues to get outside and get involved! I am assisting with organizing events across the city which are free to participate in. There are ample opportunities to get people out to new zones and explore. You can find a tentative list of events (more to come) on the website www.citynatureyyc.ca.

To maximize our observations, please upload photos of individual plants. Duplicate observations which may contain a plant and a pollinator. This will assist with the Calgary Pollinators project as well as mapping out the phenology of plants and distribution within our parks. You CAN include "captive/cultivated" observations during the CNC but please be sure to mark them when posting.

If you are also posting your photos to Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook, you can the CNC YYC page at @CityNatureYYC where I can reshare your posts and hopefully amplify your presence.

That's about it but I really really really hope that you'll participate! Please feel free to visit the website and contact me with any questions you may have citynatureyyc@gmail.com

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Hi Everyone,
Thank you for joining the project and we look forward to seeing all of your observations April 26-29! This year is the sixth annual Calgary City Nature Challenge and it looks like we have around 650+ cities worldwide participating. There are 49 Canadian cities signed up including Edmonton and Lethbridge in Alberta.. I hope that we can once again be one of the top-performing Canadian cities!

Each year, I am optimistic that we can achieve 10K observations during our four days. This has been my goal since I started planning our Calgary's first CNC event in 2019. Please try and make as many observations as you can to help make it a reality.

A couple other notes:
I have been a bit behind on promoting the CNC this year across all social media platforms. I am primarily using Instagram as a way to engage with photographers and naturalists and just starting to poke around on Facebook and X to help get the word out. All platforms to promote CNC and other citizen science events are under the username (@CityNatureYYC), so if you're keen please give a follow and help to reshare some of the posts. With that said, I do have the 2024 Calgary CNC Promo out now on YouTube. You can check it out here:

I also have the website up with some general info, FAQs, will be updating the event listings soon. Keep your eyes peeled. www.CityNatureYYC.ca

I'm excited for our biggest bioblitz event of the year and hope you'll take part! Please encourage you friends, family, and community, and colleagues to get involved and help to put Calgary's biodiversity on the map!

As another side goal for the year I am hoping that we can collectively hit 250K observations by 2025 in Calgary. It will be very close (based on current trends of posts coming in) and likely will require people to upload historical observations to meet this target. We currently have 167,000 verifiable posts (181,000 total including captive/cultivated and non-media observations). Across Alberta, 1 Million observations by 2025 is possible and I think we may reach it by the end of the year! There are 733,000 verifiable posts in the province but we had 206,000 added between Jan 1 - Dec 31, 2023 So, we may be able to do it but it will take consistency and dedication to make it happen. We'll need to recruit some new and dedicated users if we really want to get close! CNC will help but other events such as the May Species Plant Count, Calgary Pollinator Events, National Moth Week, BiodiverCity Challenge, and everything else will be essential to hit the target.

Again, thank you for participating and please feel free to reach out with any comments, questions, and ideas you may have! Best of luck this year!

Matt Wallace

CityNatureYYC@Gmail.com