This year, the international City Nature Challenge, which cities around the world compete in to boost citizen science data, collection took place from April 26th through April 29th.
I explored the Intervale Center with my friends while participating in the BioBlitz challenge.
Using iNaturalist was pretty easy. I was able to join my lab group’s iNaturalist project, and some of my observations also got added to the Vermont Atlas of Life, which was cool. One thing that was a little frustrating is that I had to manually add the location to all the observations because I didn’t do it on-site because I didn’t want to use my cellphone data.
We saw and/or heard a variety of bird species (mallard ducks, a turkey vulture, American robins, American goldfinches, tufted titmice, black-capped chickadees, and red cardinals), saw tracks of deer and river otters, and saw a variety of plant species ( including violets, burdock, nettles, periwinkles, and dandelions) in addition to an abundance of mating boxelder bugs. I made 12 observations on iNaturalist.
It was interesting to see how different other cities’ species are, but also what we have in common. For example, on the Auckland page, I noticed Amanita muscaria, a mushroom that I’ve definitely noticed around Vermont before.