Projektin City Nature Challenge 2019: Pittsburgh Päiväkirja

The 2019 City Nature Challenge numbers are in - you were part of a community of over 35,000 people in 159 cities that spent a whole weekend (plus) documenting over 31,000 species around the world. Wow!

We are so very, very grateful to everyone who contributed to this year's City Nature Challenge - THANK YOU so much for your time, photos, identifications, and interest. Our region saw a jump in number of observers, observations, and species compared to last year - in particular I want to highlight our 50% increase in observers over the challenge weekend compared to last year. Thanks to everyone who helped get the word out! For those who just discovered iNaturalist through the City Nature Challenge, we hope you'll look for other projects near you and keep using the app to document your own discoveries.

The event organizers (a collaboration between the California Academy of Sciences and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County) shared fun infographics of top results across all the projects at the City Nature Challenge page: http://citynaturechallenge.org/ We hope you'll take a look!

If you have a favorite observation you'd like to share from the challenge, either one of yours or something another user posted that caught your eye, please share in the comments. Hope to see you again next year for City Nature Challenge 2020!

The collecting phase for the City Nature Challenge ended at midnight, but we've still got a lot of work to do.

One of the most important metrics for the CNC is how many of the observations move to "research-grade," which means two or more identifiers must agree on the identification of the organism. This is where we really need your help! If you click on the link below, it will take you to the list of observations on our project that still need IDs. If you are more familiar with one group of organisms than others, you can use the filter button to narrow down. As more of the unknowns and organisms only identified to phylum/family/genus are identified to the species level, our species count will increase! Whatever our stats are on Monday, May 6 at 9am EST are considered our final stats for this project, so we've got just shy of a week to ID all these amazing organisms we've discovered.

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?project_id=city-nature-challenge-2019-pittsburgh

Also: you can continue uploading observations you made during the challenge phase (April 26-29), but we hope you can do that ASAP so identifiers have as much time as possible to check IDs.

Please join me in thanking all the observers and identifiers that are showing just how invested the Pittsburgh region is in inventorying its biodiversity. I've taken a look at some of the other city projects, and it's really impressive how well our identifiers are keeping up with the observation uploads - you all are amazing.

Thanks again, everyone! And if you have any questions please feel free to leave them in a comment.

Wow, look at those numbers climb! We've got to send a special shout-out to the 7th grade classroom that joined iNaturalist this year and has been really working hard to share observations for the 2019 City Nature Challenge - thanks so much for your contributions!

All pictures taken by midnight tonight will still count for our challenge, so head outside and keep photographing! Or maybe even stay inside - business and residential insect faunas count, and are also a really interesting aspect of urban nature! If you are worried about sharing sensitive location data with a big project like this, you can set your "Geoprivacy" setting to "obscured" to add a measure of privacy.

Good luck snapping those last few photos, and tomorrow we'll head into the identification phase of the project.

Wow!!!! Today (Sunday April 28) we surpassed the number of people who participated in the Pittsburgh region last year. Thanks so much to everyone who has shared observations this weekend! And an equally giant thanks to those of you taking time out to identify - getting our observations to research-grade is a major component of the City Nature Challenge.

If you're looking for some good reasons to keep taking photos on the LAST day for observations in the City Nature Challenge (Monday April 29), here are a few:
*It's going to be a beautiful day to take a break outside (cloudy, low 50s to low 60s, no storms til the evening).
*We hit 3000 observations on Day 3, but we need to reach about 4300 to beat our numbers from last year
*We are neck and neck with the Cleveland-Akron project - they're only a few hundred observations ahead of us (in case you're feeling competitive)

Also, just a reminder for you expert birders out there: your e-bird checklists count for the City Nature Challenge, even if you don't have a photo or sound file.

Congrats and thanks to everyone contributing to the Pittsburgh-region City Nature Challenge so far! It looks like we had a big jump in numbers of new observations AND new observers Saturday. We were worried that today (Sunday) might be a washout due to bad weather, but the rain seems to have cleared out and it looks like a beautiful day is coming. Grab your camera or your phone, grab a friend, and head outside to capture some more pictures! Be safe and have fun!

Big thanks to ALL our observers so far - keep up the good work (especially given the rainy, blustery day). We can't wait to see what's discovered in the region over the weekend!

And don't forget to take a little time to check and identify other user's identifications - we need to bring as many of our observations to research grade by May 5th as possible.

Enjoy the weekend and keep sharing photos!

The City Nature Challenge is about to begin!

Here are some questions that are coming up:

Q:How old to I have to be to join iNaturalist? A: 13 and older

Q: What kind of things should I take pictures of? A: Any plant, fungus, or wildlife (insects, snails, mammals, birds, and etc), plus tracks, scat, nests, and other signs of plants or animals count!

Q: Where can I take pictures? A: On trails, in parks, in your yard, on the sidewalk - just make sure you have permission to be in that location. Any photos from Allegheny and surrounding counties will count.

Q: Does it have to be unusual? A: NO!!!! Any life you see and photograph will count, but we will do better if you focus on plants and animals that are wild or weeds. Things that have been planted or raised by humans should be avoided for this project, if possible.