Nature Calgary is happy to be a contributing sponsor for the third annual Calgary City Nature Challenge. The City Nature Challenge goes from April 29 to May 2, 2022! Record any flora and wildlife you find by taking pictures with your smartphone or camera, and then submit them to the i Naturalist app or iNaturalist.ca.
Cities around the world will compete to see who can make the most inquiries, record the most species, and engage the most people. This year, we're trying to meet a benchmark of 10,000 observations and 1000 observers! Help us make it happen!
The event is free and open to all ages. Organize a trip with your friends, family, or community and enjoy nature close to home. Look in your backyards, favorite parks, or explore the unknown! Wildlife is omnipresent, and this program is aimed at connecting you with your local ecosystem. During the 2024 City Nature Challenge, have fun and showcase our local biodiversity on a global scale.
Getting Involved Is a Click or Three Away
Joining in the competition is as simple as installing the iNaturalist app. Users may create a profile directly in the iPhone application or via the iNaturalist website.
Read Also: Why Are My Parakeet Is Losing Tail Feathers?
Then, tapping on the programs tab and typing “Calgary 2024” into the query bar will bring up the City Nature Challenge 2024: Calgary Metropolitan Region initiative. Before clicking on that icon and getting into the project website, users can then join the challenge by pressing the join button.
Notes can be entered commencing at midnight on Thursday. He said more individuals are getting more aware of the opportunity to capture and report sightings of wildlife.
We have had those kinds of things in existence for a while, like the 311 Wildlife complaint systems and camera trap initiatives like Calgary Capture going on across the city, but as more folks are aware of those apps, there is constant growth and recording about what’s happening,” he said.
And while the challenge only takes place over a four-day period, people can continue to share their findings year-round to assist in charting things like the migratory patterns of birds. Since 2019, Calgarians have posted approximately 100,000 observations.
Citizen Science and Stewardship
Wallace added that he expects that the competition will assist to involve people, but also showcase some of the local work performed by ecological stewards and conservation groups.
He remarked that the introduction of web tools gives citizens possibilities to become more conscious of the environment around them. It gives them the “tools to just only know what’s living about us and how we can properly manage these areas, but how people are interacting with it.
Trending Post: Flightless Bird of South America NYT Crossword Clue
The data gathering, which is free source, is available for use by land management and preservation groups, in addition to scientists and academics.
The most essential thing I believe to remember here is that we really don’t have much information about what lives in cities,” he said. They’re incredibly dynamic ecosystems, they’re continually evolving. This provides us a time, a place, and an identity of what it is that’s living around us.
But this can be as local as a person's backyard. If that be helping to offer information regarding sightings of bobcats and moose, or coyotes, to merely maintaining track of more indigenous plant species. Because a lot of folks are like ‘oh, okay.
I want to plant the butterfly garden or bring new plants into my yard.’ It’s a good way to maintain track of even your own land, see what’s happening on there, and share it with a bigger community,” said Watson.
