The annual City Nature Challenge (CNC) started Friday and will run through Tuesday of next week. Due the pandemic, the 2020 and 2021 events weren’t actually – as they had been before – a “challenge” between cities to find the most examples of wildlife in their areas. Instead, they were more like a collective exercise in celebrating the nature around us. This year’s City Nature Challenge is a hybrid between collaboration and competition. CNC is one of our favorite annual events and regular readers may remember our many Buzz stories about this fun citizen science annual event.
But in case CNC is new to you… it was started in 2016 by scientists at the Natural History Museums of Los Angeles County, along with their peers at San Francisco’s California Academy of Sciences, as a friendly competition between the two institutions to engage their respective communities in celebrating nature around annual Earth Day celebrations.
Since then, CNC has grown into an international event, motivating people around the world to find and document wildlife in their cities. Run by the Community Science teams at the California Academy of Sciences and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, the annual four-day global “bioblitz” demonstrates what can be accomplished when we all work toward a common goal while at the same time nudging each city’s participants to gather the most observations of nature, find the most species, and engage the most people in the event.
Here’s your chance to contribute to a global database of urban wildlife and have some fun at the same time. To learn more about how to participate, click here.
