Over this past weekend, from last Friday, April 28, to yesterday, May 1, I joined hundreds of local residents in the Greater Burlington area in documenting as many species as I could in the area and uploading my results to iNaturalist. I started off the challenge pretty strong by documenting the species that surrounded me on UVM’s campus. On the overall leaderboard for this day, I ended the day by finishing first for the most observations, and second for the most species. On the second day, it was a little bit harder to hold my ranking because more and more people were beginning to participate, however, I visited Rock Point Commons to participate in their nature celebration, and while doing so, frequently uploaded my new findings to iNaturalist. Because of Rock Point’s great species diversity, I was able to hold my first place ranking overall once again, for the second day in a row. However, on the third day, I quickly dropped down two places. In order to bump up my status, I visited the Intervale and the spectacular nature day celebration they held and documented even more species, finishing off the day in second place. By Monday afternoon, however, I dropped down to 5th place regardless of the fact that I was continuing to upload my findings around UVM’s campus, and by the time the challenge ended, I ranked 8th in observations. However, I also ranked fourth in the number of species I observed, which I would consider a win.
Overall, I ended up encountering 170 species, which were mostly plants. I really liked using iNaturalist for this challenge, it made me feel really connected to both the nature that surrounds me and the people in the area that surround me. One thing I notice and found interesting while watching the global leader board during this challenge was that cities as big as New York City barely had double the amount of observations that Burlington had. I figured they would have knocked us out of the park because of how big their population is compared to ours, however they were not that much higher than us on the leader board. I had a lot of fun doing this challenge and I hope it gains more and more popularity in the coming years.
