City Nature Challenge - increasing citizen science participation through organized competitions

Session: Great Lakes Citizen Science: Leveraging Our Love of the Lakes (2)

Marte Kitson, Minnesota Sea Grant, [email protected]
Tom Hollenhorst, EPA Mid Continent Ecology Division, [email protected]
Ryan Hueffmeier, Boulder Lake ELC, [email protected]

Abstract

Organized competitions such as the City Nature Challenge can serve as a way to increase participation in community (citizen) science and serves as a way to catalog biodiversity. The City Nature Challenge, a project on iNaturalist, began in 2016 as a friendly competition between San Francisco and Los Angeles, California to see which city could catalog the most biodiversity. The challenge expanded to other cities in 2017, including Duluth, Minnesota. In 2018, 68 cities participated world-wide, and over 160 cities participated in 2019. The Challenge is held simultaneously at participating locations, and participants use iNaturalist to crowd-source identifications, contribute to their local Challenge, and keep track of their observations. The Challenge takes place in two parts 1) participants take pictures of wild living things, and 2) experts identify what was found.

These efforts not only contribute to our understanding of biodiversity within the Great Lakes watershed, they engage community (citizen) scientists in a worldwide effort and may provide scientists with hard-to-access data. Additionally, observations made on iNaturalist may lead to the identification of species of importance (i.e. rare or endangered, invasive) that may inform management or planning decisions.