The City Nature Challenge is less than a week away! April 24-27
Hey everyone!
The City Nature Challenge is back again this year from April 24-27! While COVID-19 has put a dampener on our plans, the main CNC organizers, as well as many other cities, are going ahead with the CNC but in a very limited way. This time around we don't have any group activities like guided walks and bioblitzes and are instead encouraging individuals or small family units to go out on their own and make observations in their own houses, backyards, neighborhoods and where/when it is safe to do so, parks and woodlands (while using masks and maintaining proper social distancing guidelines, of course). The CNC is also not being pitched as a competition this year, but rather as a collaborative effort where cities around the world work together to document biodiversity in urban areas.
Like last year, the challenge area is the county of Philadelphia plus all counties that directly share a border with Philadelphia. This includes Montgomery, Bucks and Delaware counties in PA and Camden, Gloucester and Burlington counties in NJ. During the competition last year, the Greater Philadelphia Area did pretty well coming in the low 20s for both observations and species but what we did really well in was the number of people participating (thanks to all of you!) coming in 16th place, and beating NYC with over 500 people making at least one observation.
I'm tagging you here because you are one of the top observers in our region (either all time or recently) and we would love to have your help in making even more observations during this 4 day period next weekend. And to make sure we get as many species as possible, I've made a simple website that shows you all the species that have been reported in our region during April and May, but not yet seen during the CNC: http://targets.cncphilly.org/. The species are organized in descending order of how many observations have been made for that species. As people make observations, they will fall of that list every 30 minutes or so.
We would also love your help in spreading the word about the CNC among your family and friends. You can also tag them in the comments here.
Here are some useful links with more info:
Philly CNC website: https://cncphilly.org/
Philly CNC iNat project: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/city-nature-challenge-2020-greater-philadelphia-area
Main CNC website: http://citynaturechallenge.org/
Last year's results: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/city-nature-challenge-2019
Thanks for documenting the biodiversity of our region and we hope you'll help us during the CNC as well.
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