I enjoyed participating in the City Nature Challenge. Although I was only able to go around campus on Saturday—thanks to 2nd dose vaccine side effects—I was still able to observe a lot of diversity in the small area that I was in. It was super sunny, so it was nice walking around campus observing nature. I was surprised at the amount of diverse species I observed just in the short walk from CCRH to the Waterman Green. I saw one of my favorite tree species—the Ash—while I was walking along the green. It was very mature, and I liked how the bark on it was very distinct. This was one of the only species I was able to identify though, other than dandelions and a Spruce tree. The last three pictures that I took are some of my favorite observations. I thought that they all looked very interesting even without being able to identify them myself. The first tree had some sort of dark berry growing from it, and I thought the other tree was very interesting looking with its reddish leaves. It was very apparent that spring had come; there was so much color in the plants growing around campus compared to the grayness of winter.

I enjoyed using iNaturalist because it was relatively easy joining the projects and uploading the observations. Though it was a little confusing because some of my observations disappeared (19 to 8), but other than that I thought everything was pretty straightforward. I also enjoyed how you could see the stats in each of the projects. I also enjoyed looking at the challenge globally. Currently there are 842,267 observations with 34,451 species. It was interesting looking at the map views too. Most of the observations for the United States were on the East Coast. I also looked at some other areas like Canada and the UK. Canada currently has 35,373 observations and the UK currently has 43,262.

Overall, I really enjoyed the City Nature Challenge. I think it’s a great opportunity for people all over the world to get outside and appreciate the diversity in nature. I also think it’s a really great opportunity for contributing to research and supplying images for future reference of what nature looked like today.

Update: I ended up getting 49 observations with 37 counting towards the challenge. I was able to identify 18 species as well. It was very fun getting to watch the counts for each lab group and I really loved the experience overall.