As a part of the iNaturalist Bioblitz City Nature Challenge, I made my way down to Waterfront Park, braving the rather cold and rainy Sunday weather. I walked along the boardwalk and the bike path, identifying absolutely everything: from flowers to songbirds to squirrels. It was easy to navigate the iNaturalist app, upload my findings to the correct projects, and some of my observations have already been confirmed by professionals on the app! That was fast!
Species
Despite the dreary weather, Waterfront Park was still buzzing with activity. Not even the wind could drown out the lovely songs of various bird species. Not to brag or anything but I made 14 observations of 14 different species! Here are my results:
- Plants: Queen Anne’s Lace, common evening-primrose, common blue wood aster, rough cocklebur, common mugwort, silver maple, pontic rhododendron, spotted deadnettle, white clover
- Animals/Birds: Eastern grey squirrel, song sparrow, black-capped chickadee, seagull, American robin
Global Scale
I enjoyed looking at the global statistics and scouring the leaderboard on the iNaturalist website and as of right now (Sunday 1 pm), Burlington is…. not even close to first place. I was surprised to see San Antonio at the top of the leaderboard with a significant lead over the other cities. I haven’t yet accepted Burlington’s defeat, there is still time to make an epic comeback! I was also surprised to see my hometown of Baltimore was far above Burlington, with almost 4,000 more observations than Burly. I guess I never knew how widespread and thoroughly executed this challenge was because I had never heard of it. But it’s cool to know that so many people all over the world, including my hometown, are united through a challenge to participate in citizen science to allow better understanding of biodiversity in urban areas. That’s all for now folks, see you next time for my FINAL phenology post! (can you even believe it’s almost over?)
-M