City Nature Challenge
During this week’s iNaturalist BioBlitz I explored The Intervale on a foraging walk! It was a lot of fun and I learned about a lot of species that can be used for natural medicines and vitamins. A friend and I walked there from campus and ran around documenting a lot of plants as well as birds and critters in the pond. I’ve submitted 42 observations so far and they’ve been really easy to add. It’s a very simple system of taking a picture or recording a sound, much simpler than I remembering it being the last time I used it. For some species I already knew the specific name, but for most I had no idea what they were called. I like that iNaturalist gives you its best guess so you can look through and have somewhere to start. The feature where others can confirm your sightings is really awesome, especially considering there are a lot of people like me who aren’t sure about a lot of the things they’re seeing. I thought it was really cool how many cities across the world are participating in this event. I don’t think they account for population differences in the leaderboard, so it’s big cities that are ahead. I think of big cities as being places with very little biodiversity, but big cities are still ahead in the number of species category, although that might just be due to the fact that they have more people looking rather than there actually being more species there. This event has been a lot of fun and I’ve gotten way more comfortable using iNaturalist!
