It’s Challenge Time! Get Out for Nature
About this time a year ago, I took a couple days off from work in my job as the Senior Endangered Species Analyst for Defenders of Wildlife. Instead of being in downtown Washington, DC, working on science and policy for threatened and endangered species, I was about 80 miles west, near where I grew up in Front Royal, Virginia, taking part in the 2017 City Nature Challenge. We were looking for every plant and animal species we could find, including things like large white trilliums, red-backed salamanders and eastern towhee. These aren’t threatened or endangered, but they are among the original species that got me interested in biology, and that Defenders works to protect: native plants and animals in their natural habitats. I’ll be taking a few days off at the end of April to participate in this year’s event, and I’m encouraging our members and followers to join in too!
The 2018 City Nature Challenge is occurring in 60 cities worldwide, April 27–30. I’ll be participating in the Washington, D.C., challenge in spots from the Chesapeake Bay to the Massanutten Mountains, and you can take part in a challenge near you. (If you don’t have a participating city nearby, you can still get out around where you live and have fun anyway!) If you want an excuse to go out taking pictures of plants and animals and want to contribute to a fun community science project, then I encourage you to join in! All you need is access to the outdoors and a healthy curiosity! To share what you find, start an iNaturalist account, and be sure to bring along a way to take pictures (I almost always just use my phone) and a way to upload your observations to iNaturalist (again, the phone works great).
“But wait,” you might say, “I’m not a biologist or a naturalist and don’t know the first thing about identifying flowers and ferns and snakes and birds and such!” Great news: that’s not a requirement! You can add identifications to your observations if you want, but you don’t have to. One of the cool things about iNaturalist is that it is a great way to learn how to identify species. For one thing, the phone app will suggest species identifications using your photo! You can take a picture of a small flower — like this toadshade — and iNaturalist will suggest a species based on an analysis of millions of previous observations. It is a tool I use all the time to learn species I don’t know, and it is incredible how often the iNaturalist identification is correct. If iNaturalist can’t identify your discovery, once your observations are uploaded to the website (which is as easy as a single tap), other people can help you learn what species you found.
While the City Nature Challenge happens just a few days per year, there’s no reason why you can’t go out any day — or every day — and find plants and critters! iNaturalist is a way to explore the outdoors, be part of a community that enjoys biodiversity and feed community science to improve conservation decisions. Ultimately, the best hope for conservation is to have people all over the world aware and appreciative of nature in their everyday lives. The City Nature Challenge is just one piece of that puzzle — a gateway to getting you hooked on nature. Basically, you can go out, take pictures of the things in nature, contribute to a big citizen science project, learn new species and meet other nature-minded people, all while having fun!
From April 27th to 30th, take the opportunity to join me and thousands of other people in the City Nature Challenge. Bring your friends, your kids, an unsuspecting date, out into the wild and see what you can find. Some of my favorites, like Gila monsters, won’t be around the D.C. area, but I’ll be watching for others, like great blue herons. You might find some old or new favorites of your own! Oh and it is a competition, so make sure you contribute to your city’s count so you can brag when your hometown makes more observations than your friends’.
-Jacob
