Diario del proyecto City Nature Challenge 2024: Greater Philadelphia Area

The City Nature Challenge (CNC) 2024 results are in! A big thank you to everyone who participated in the 2024 CNC. This was our best year ever for species (2429) and participants (1036) and second best for observations (20637)! With all 691 cities across the world now done, Philly finished 23rd in observations, 27th in species, and 15th in observers.

Worldwide, La Paz, Bolivia came first in all three categories with a whopping 165k observations, 5352 species, and 3593 participants. In the US, San Antonio was first in observations (65k), Houston in species (4113), and San Francisco in participants (2552). The only city north of us that had more species than us was Innsbruck, Austria with 4448 species!

Locally, out of our 2429 species, 1287 species were plants, 474 insects, 250 fungi, 170 birds, 78 arachnids, 24 mammals, 22 reptiles, and 16 amphibians.

As is tradition, @srall topped the observations chart again this year with 1681 observations. Sara is also number one in species with 517 species which is our best individual species total breaking last year's record. This is made all the more impressive by the fact that Sara splits her time between the NYC and Philly CNCs and is usually in the top 5 in both cities!

@conboy had the second most species with 492 and @jameshoughton had the second most observations with 776.

Shoutouts also to @rust_bucket and @seahound for rounding out our top 6 for both observations and species. And a huge thank you to @annebekker for making 1800 identifications for us, @maryah with 1611, and @conboy with 645.

Well done to everyone else who contributed observations and IDs too! If you're curious about any other info, let me know and I'm happy to slice and dice the data. Also, let me know what your favorite observations were this CNC - yours or someone else's, any other highlights, tips on how to do even better next year, anything!

A big thank you once again to everyone who participated and helped spread the word. We couldn't do this without you. Mark your calendars for next year's CNC: April 25-28, 2025

We have just a few hours left to upload our observations (we have until tomorrow 9 am - but better to get them in sooner in case iNat is slow), so if you have anything left to add, now is your chance. Take a look at our Needs List and see if there's anything you might have seen or heard that we still need. Thanks again for participating everyone!

A huge huge thank you to everyone for participating this year. Getting to 1000 participants has been a goal of ours for 5 years now. We've danced around in the 900s in years past (not last year though, we only had 600 odd people participate due to the bad weather) without ever reaching that coveted 1k. I thought this year was going to be more of the same, but right now, we're sitting pretty at exactly 1000 participants.

Even though it's still not a competition, we can't help our competitive spirit. We're currently at 26th in observations, 23rd in species, and 14th in participants out of 690 odd cities around the world. You can see the full list at CNC Live Results. Only 3 cities that are north of us have more species than us, and they're all in Austria. Does anybody have any thoughts on why Austria does so well with species numbers?

But back to us, we have our highest ever numbers for species and participants this year. And I'm really proud of the community for stepping up and rising to the challenge.

You still have until 9 am Monday, the 6th to upload and ID all your observations, but it's better not to wait until the last moment. If you'd like to help us ID observations and increase our species count and our percentage of research grade observations, you can do so at this link.

Thanks again to everyone participating, whether it's observing or IDing or both!

This is your last chance to make those observations! As the last day begins we stand at 13k observations, 1900 species, and 774 observers.

We still have a few more easy-to-get species and we're still shy of our 1k participant goal. Today is the chance to convince your family, friends, and co-workers to make an account and log at least one observation. :)

Here's a sample of our current top needs list, but you can visit http://targets.cncphilly.org/ to see an auto-refreshing full list.

We're now halfway through the 2024 City Nature Challenge. After a strong start on Friday, we seem to have slowed down considerably. We didn't get to 1500 species, nor did we get to 500 participants. NYC is ahead of us in 2 out of 3 categories, and DC is far ahead of us in all categories. In just the Americas, we're currently at 18th for observations, 15th for species, and 19th for participants. The weather might have had something to do with that - it was cloudy and kinda chilly all day yesterday. But it's going to be warmer today and maybe we'll get some sun.

We still have a lot of fairly easy-to-find species on our needs list. You can see the full list at http://targets.cncphilly.org, but here's a snapshot of our top 50 needed species.

You can visit the site throughout the day today and tomorrow to see what we still need. It updates every 30 minutes and you can also filter by your area of interest.

How have everyone else's two days been so far? I'd love to hear about your experiences, any unexpected things you've found, what you're looking forward to, etc. Similar to last year, my insect count has been low so far. I haven't seen a single butterfly yet even though they were flitting in my yard just the day before the CNC started, Let's see what today has to offer. Happy iNatting, everyone! And let's go, Philly!

We had a pretty good start yesterday. So let's keep that momentum going. After day 1, we have collectively seen over 1000 species and have had 285 people take part! Individually, we have young @petermhoughton leading the observations category with nearly 400 observations, and @conboy with an amazing single-day species tally of 227.

How many more species will we find today? We're still missing a ton of easy species, so it shouldn't be too hard to get to 1.5k species today. See what species we still need at http://targets.cncphilly.org/.

And now that it's the weekend, can we get 500 new people to make an observation? Tell your friends and family to make an account and log a few observations. :)

Good luck everyone!

Brrr....it's a cold start to the CNC. But the forecast looks way better than last year. Who's ready to go find some wildlife? We're off to a strong start with 34 species already. How many more can we get today? Unfortunately, I can only do the weekend this time, so I'm relying on all of you to go make some extra observations for me. :) Good luck and happy iNatting!