The annual City Nature Challenge (CNC) is happening again this week, starting tomorrow and going through Wednesday of next week. But because of the pandemic, this year’s event is not actually a “challenge” between cities to find the most nature as it has been in the past). Instead, it’s more like a collective exercise in celebrating the nature around us. CNC is one of our favorite annual events and regular readers have heard about it before and there are lots of our stories on the Buzz about this fun citizen science annual event.
But in case CNC is new to you… it was started in 2016 by scientists at the Natural History Museums of Los Angeles County along with their peers at San Francisco’s California Academy of Sciences as a friendly competition between the two institutions to engage their respective communities in celebrating nature around annual Earth Day celebrations.
Since then, CNC has grown into an international event, motivating people around the world to find and document wildlife in their cities. Run by the Community Science teams at the California Academy of Sciences and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, the an annual four-day global “bioblitz” demonstrates what can be accomplished when we all work toward a common goal while at the same time nudging each city’s participants to gather the most observations of nature, find the most species, and engage the most people in the event.
In light of the COVID-19 pandemic last year, organizers decided to drop the competition element and instead “embrace the healing power of nature and celebrate tens of thousands of people all around the world, searching for and documenting their local biodiversity, together,” according to the CNC website. Still not completely out of the pandemic, the CNC has choosing again to focus more on collaboration and celebration rather than competition.
Here’s your chance to contribute to a global database of urban wildlife and have some fun at the same time. To learn more about how to participate, click here. We were inspired this morning by this honey bee in the nasturtium that is popping up all over our garden.
Convinced yet? Below is a short video about last year’s CNC that featured more than 300 cities participating in creating an international database of urban wild life.