Event Description
The zoom meeting has concluded, but the instructions to participate in the project are below.
The City Nature Challenge is an international celebration of biodiversity in and around urban areas. Join us when Christianah Oyenuga, the The Nature Conservancy’s Orlando Metro Cities Program Manager, tells us about the program and “How to use the iNaturalist app for the City Nature Challenge.”
City Nature Challenge
The City Nature Challenge is an annual, global, community science competition to document urban biodiversity. The challenge is a bioblitz that engages residents and visitors to find and document plants, animals, and other organisms living in urban areas. The goals are to engage the public in the collection of biodiversity data, with three awards each year for the cities that makes the most observations, find the most species, and engage the most people.
General Information
https://citynaturechallenge.org
For more info - check the website:
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/city-nature-challenge-2022-volusia-county
Here is a quick how-to
Download iNaturalist on your phone or log on on a computer and establish an account (Most of us are already set up for his)
On your iNaturalist equipped smart phone - go out anywhere in Volusia County, take pics with iNaturalist of any natural thing. If you know what it is, identify it. If not, don’t worry, still record it. Insects, reptiles, arthropods, flowers, trees, birds, beasts - anything.
Entries are accepted if dated April 29 through May 2
4 total days of observations
All observations must be done in this time period - no loading old pics….
If you choose to take pictures outside of the app, make sure that they are dated and have location information imbedded in the image - most newer digital cameras have this. You can upload these entries on the website on a desktop computer. From your iNaturalist Dashboard home page there is a pull down menu that has all kinds of options for uploading. You can even upload a CSV file (Think eBird export) to the database
After the entry, go in to iNaturalist from a computer and help identify the items that had folks stumped in the project in your area of expertise. Or check your entries and see what folks have told you about the things that you saw. This continues through May 8.
And you're done!
You can choose to join the project communications page from the app, but that is not entirely necessary to get started. When they pull the data from the all of the entries, it will be based on GPS coordinates and date. When you join a project, it means that you get access to the communications and journal notes specific to this project. That could be helpful. You could then participate in the back side of the project where you assist with identifications
