Final Bioblitz Report from iNaturalist, 2023 CNC

HELLO BIOBLITZ PEEPS!
Below is the email just received from the CNC Team in CA, about the 2023 results. I'm sorry if the spreadsheet they cite doesn't work for you, I dunno if the copy/paste from email to this Journal will highlight the link. I'm scrambling to get out of town and haven't time to research that just now.

Two things of note:

1. The 2024 Date is set! April 27-30, mark your calendars. Hope you can make it. I'd like to establish an Organizer's meeting and Committee to help out for the next year. I NEEDED HELP, as I did this alone except for some advise and connections/promotions from/by Peter Kleinhenz who organized the one in 2019. Clearly we could generate bigger numbers and have more folks involved but I need help to get folks into it. Please reach out to me at my personal email: iaskevold@gmail.com if you can maybe help me with the next one! TIA!

2. Our own Blitz #s:
   Observations: 3,846
   Species: 1,263
   Observers: 232
   Identifiers: 413
   % to Research Grade: 72.65
   As to other details, please visit the CNC Bioblitz Project, surf around the page, see its stats.

HERE IS THE EMAIL FROM THE INATURALIST TEAM IN Los Angeles AND San Francisco
Hope you can figure out the "link" they sent, I've not looked at that yet.

Hello amazing CNC organizers!

We did it! The 8th annual City Nature Challenge is done! Thank you so much for all your time, effort, and hard work in making this event as successful as it is – we literally could not do it without you! We've been up all night gathering each city's numbers as it became 9am, Monday May 8 for each of you. With our two Hawaiian cities finally getting their Monday started, we have the full results to share! Here are the collective results:

Observations: 1,870,763
Species: 57,227+, including more than 2,570 rare/endangered/threatened species
Observers: 66,394
Most-observed species globally: Mallard duck (Anas platyrhynchos)
And congratulations to our “top” cities:

The Top 5 are listed per 3 criteria:
Observations
Species
Observers

1st Place
La Paz, Bolivia: 126,435
La Paz, Bolivia: 5,344
La Paz, Bolivia: 3,025

2nd Place
Cape Town, South Africa: 52,518
Hong Kong, SAR, China: 4,469
San Francisco Bay Area, California, USA: 2,488

3rd Place
Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas, USA: 48,021
Cosalá, Sinaloa, Mexico: 3,912
Los Angeles County, California, USA: 1,671

4th Place
Mazatlán, Sinaloa, Mexico: 42,479
Cape Town, South Africa: 3,847
Monterrey Zona Metropolitana, Mexico: 1,655

5th Place
Houston-Galveston, Texas, USA: 41,736
Houston-Galveston, Texas, USA: 3,707
Washington DC Metro Area, USA: 1,527

Congrats organizers! This marks three years in a row we've made more than one million observations in four days. That’s a reflection of all the time and hard work all of you have put into making the CNC happen in your community. Whether your city made 100 observations or 10,000 observations, we are so grateful to have you as a CNC organizer.

We've linked to and attached some resources to help you look through the results and communicate them to your city's participants:

CNC 2023 Results Workbook: [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1K5RxZ84VW-HttvGyrf2dv6M3ev6OJwUymWxxr8wUX28/copy] When you click this link, Google will ask you to make a copy of this workbook – this way you can sort the results in the ways that help you best see your city’s results, and you won’t change anything for anyone else! There are multiple spreadsheets in this workbook, and all the columns of each sheet have a filter on them so you can sort each sheet to look at the data in different ways:

Collective results: the combined numbers across cities and platforms, and includes a full list of all the countries with participating cities

City Numbers: the official numbers from each city (collected at 9am, Monday, May 9 for each city). There are three groups of numbers for each city: (1) the TOTAL observations, species, identifiers, and observers; (2) the VERIFIABLE (has evidence, not captive/cultivated) observations, species, identifiers, and observers; (3) the RESEARCH GRADE (verifiable and has community consensus on the ID) observations, species, identifiers, and observers

Percent Verifiable and Research Grade: shows for each city the percent of TOTAL observations and species were VERIFIABLE, and the percent of the VERIFIABLE observations and species that have become RESEARCH GRADE. (Note: if your platform wasn't an iNaturalist platform, then you'll just have the first set of numbers - the TOTAL ones.)

Average # of Observations per Observer: for each city, the TOTAL observations divided by the TOTAL observers to show the average number of observations each observer made

Hemisphere/Climate: Includes all the numbers listed above for each city, and each city has been classified by its climate type and if it's in the northern hemisphere, southern hemisphere, or the tropics (between the Tropics of Cancer & Capricorn). Use this sheet if you're interested to see how your city compared to other cities that are in your climate zone (and thus may have been experiencing similar seasonality/weather during the CNC).

Population: The results with categories for the total population that lives inside of the boundaries for each city. Useful if you’d like to compare your city’s results with other cities that have similar population sizes. This was self-reported, so if a cell is blank or seems wrong, it’s because the organizer didn’t fill this out or put the wrong number in our city info spreadsheet (we tried to correct some of them, but didn’t have time to do them all).

Area (km2): The results with size categories for the total area included within the boundaries for cities. Useful if you’d like to compare your city’s results with other cities that covered similar amounts of area. This was self-reported, so if a cell is blank or seems wrong, it’s because the organizer didn’t fill this out or put the wrong number in our city info spreadsheet (we tried to correct some of them, but didn’t have time to do them all).

MASTER: Includes all the total, verifiable, and research grade numbers listed above for each city and includes the links we used to get the "City Numbers" stats

NOTE: if you see any mistakes with the stats for your city, let us know ASAP. We apologize for any mis-typed results–we did stay up all night to gather them, so in our sleepy state we may have entered a wrong number somewhere. We'll change the results and you can make another copy of the results workbook that will have the corrected numbers.

CNC 2023 Infographic: highlighting the collective results and interesting finds from around the world. We wish we could've included more interesting finds–there were so many! We had a great time looking through all of them & seeing the incredible biodiversity in all the different places we all call home. We’ve attached it as a pdf, a png image, and you can also use this link if you want to post it in your CNC project journal:

Also feel free to make an infographic highlighting your city’s results! It’s easy in platforms like Canva (where the infographic above was made). Here’s an example from the San Francisco Bay Area.

Look for an email next week: Next week we’ll send out the CNC organizer video (thank you to everyone that made & uploaded a video for it!), a survey to gather your thoughts and feedback about this year’s CNC, and a sign-up sheet for our (optional) debrief meeting that will be happening in early June!

Next year’s City Nature Challenge: April 27-30, 2024 – put it on your calendar!

Thanks so much,

Alison, Lila, Amy, Olivia, and Sam

Posted on May 8, 2023 11:43 PM by ingolfaskevold