Want to participate in the City Nature Challenge? It’s simple, here’s how:
- Go outside and find wildlife
- Take photos
- Upload your observations to iNaturalist
If you prefer more detailed instructions, here they are:
Before the challenge:
During the challenge:
- Go out – You can go to one of our scheduled events or go exploring on your own. You can even hang out in your own backyard.
- Find any wild thing – Plant, mammal, bird, insect, fungi, fish, or even evidence of living organisms like tracks, shells or scat. A tree gnawed by a beaver can even count as 2 observations! One for the tree and another for the beaver (even if you didn’t actually see the beaver).
- Make a recording of it – Pictures are preferred, but we can take audio recordings too (video recordings are currently not supported, but you can convert them into small gifs first using something like the ezgif website and the upload the gif).
- Note your location – Either manually or you can set up your phone as well as many modern cameras to automatically record the GPS coordinates of our photos.
- Upload your observations – Add your observations to iNaturalist. You don’t need to manually add your observations to the project; the project will automatically aggregate any observations made in the designated area. You can upload observations using the iNaturalist app in the field or from your computer using the iNaturalist website. Check out our resources section for help with this.
After the challenge:
- Identify – Help identify other people’s observations. This will help boost our species totals.
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