I participated in the city nature challenge this year and I thought it was a really wonderful experience. Not only did it convince me to get outside and participate in a hike or an exploration, it brought me back into a competitive mindset that I had lost for a while being here at college. It was definitely an important experience and it was a lot of fun too. I mostly explored the Centennial woods near the trail head, since that area was largely unexplored on the map when we looked.
My favorite observations were genuinely just the plants. I loved the ostrich ferns and seeing how they curl before they become the ferns we know. I’ve loved ferns for a while, but I hadn’t seen that before.
I had used iNaturalist before, so it wasn’t an entirely new experience, but it was new to upload to a project. I enjoy using the app because it does give me a lot of options for plants to choose from, and I think that’s really valuable.
Honestly I was so surprised that Cape Town had the most people participating and the most observations. I think my mind just never associated the fact that this really was a global thing, and that the top cities were mostly abroad, not in the US. I think that was really cool because it connected us all as environmentalists and having interest groups because we were doing the same challenge, in the same timeframe, with the same app. It was a cool connection for sure.