City Nature Challenge!
𓍢ִ໋🀦⛆⋆✧˖°. For the 2024 Burlington BioBlitz, I found myself facing challenges with “natural” vegetation in the landscape. Since I do not have a car, three of the four days I was limited to logging all of the flora and fauna I saw around campus, which was largely planted. However, I was able to go to Spectacular Nature Day on Sunday (4/28/24) at the Intervale with a friend! We spent a lot of time explornig the booths while also logging any curious plants we saw. Many of my peers were volunteering for this event, so it was cool to see them. While my area of exploration was relatively small, I still had a great time logging the things I saw and discovering new species in my campus backyard.
My experience during this BioBlitz with iNaturalist was amazing. It felt very easy to operate, and I appreciate the feature of logging past photos instead of having to take them all on the app, and I felt like the feature made it easier to take a photo then upload/identify later in the day. Sometimes I faced challenges with uploading, but it was usually due to the poor service I was in at the time of upload. Between my two locations of exploration, I encountered a total of 19 species, with 40 overall observations (see below). Also, I heavily enjoyed the competitive aspect of the challenge between lab sections, even if the competition is friendly. After attending the Main Street Landing community science event, I realized how important observations on iNaturalist truly are to biodiversity research, and it inspired me to log as much as possible for this challenge to try and help the local science community. While I was not perfect with my observations and had some corrections/comments on my images, the fun I had observing all the flora and fauna I encountered was a continuous highlight of my City Nature Challenge.
Upon looking at this year’s current global leaderboard, I am surprised. I was not sure what I was expecting, but it was not Texas to have multiple cities on the current leaderboard (04/28/24 @ 2pm). It also shocked me to see Bolivia as the top country, as I am not familiar with the large amount of natural space the country must have for its scores to be as high as they are. It did make me happy to see New York City on the leaderboard though, as it shows the true perseverance of the beautiful natural world in such an urban epicenter. Knowing all of these cities are slightly different in urban-to-natural ratio but still seeing participation from them all also put a smile on my face. While this was my first City Nature Challenge BioBlitz, I cannot wait to continue observing year after year, and becoming more aware of the natural beauty that surrounds us in the cities we inhabit.
