50 days to go
Just 50 days to the 2023 City Nature Challenge.
At this stage most people who have joined the project are Organizers. If you know of any organizers who have not joined, please ask them to do so.
But it is now time to start asking participants to join both your city project, and this "southern African Umbrella" project. From time to time and during the event we will post journal articles that might interest your participants: please also feel free to copy, use or adapt any journal items in your own project journals.
As can be seen on the main page, we have 31 Cities taking part. There is just a very small window to add cities, but by now most organizers should have their committees in place, portfolios assigned to specific members, and at least a rough plan of action and events.
At present, only Lesotho, Malawi, Namibia & Zimbabwe are not taking part, which is a pity. As usual Botswana is roaring to go, and Eswatini & Ruwanda are each fielding 2 cities.
Welcome especially to the new cities: we hope that this will be fun.
Because this event is over a holiday period, it will be difficult to do school activities. And some of our cities will be emptying out. However, other of our cities will be experiencing an influx of holiday visitors: please feel free to capture and enrapture these and get your events and tallies for the City Nature Challenge up.
I will shortly be posting the standard FAQ, so many of the usual questions will be dealt with there. But if you have any questions about organizing or issues or just need some feedback or assurance, please feel free to use the comments below, and to answer anyone's queries if you have some insight or suggestions.
Here is to a great 2023 City Nature Challenge. May the best city win!!!
Comments
We still have 2 chances to add species to CV. For the first CNC, CV couldn't even recognise Protea cynaroides.
Added to CV in February https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/149895908
This I learnt and found on iNat in CNC22 https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/589558-Mairia-coriacea
Maybe we could include https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/594331-Senecio-paniculatus in 2023
@lynnharper cleared the CNC22 backlog. And is now working at CNC21. Please encourage identifiers, ahead of CNC. And afterwards too!
In case anyone is wondering CV: Computer Vision - the automatic IDs one gets from the iNaturalist Artificial Intelligence.
Only observations with over 100 photos qualify - but the rule of thumb we use is 100 observations.
Any species that does not make the cut, has not been put into training and so the CV (iNat AI) will try and match it with those species that it does know. This is a pain for rare species, that will be misidentified as a more common species. It is even more of a pain for underreported groups in southern Africa that are common in America and Europe, as they will be misidentified as those species.
So the bottom line: we need at least 100 observations of all our species ASAP!!!
And how are we doing? (totals are not full totals, but only the totals recorded so far on iNat for southern Africa - for some groups we only have a fraction of the species on iNat at all, so training is hardly possible on those not even recorded! Go out and record them!).
Birds 500 species (out of 1124) trained.
Amphibians: 45 spp (out of 180) trained.
Reptiles: 115 spp (out of 580) trained
Mammals: 100 sp (out of 435) trained
Fish: 25 spp (out of 1,190) trained
Molluscs: 50 spp (out of 1,138) trained
Arachnids: 60 spp (out of 1,268) trained
Insects: 470 spp (out of 9,884) trained
Plants : > 1000 spp (out of 22,000) trained
Fungi: 50 spp (out of 1,310) trained
So there is a little room for improvement still ...
Dear Tony,
The clock is ticking! I have a request. Please could you help find a project that IBSA (Indigenous Bulb Society of S.A.) can join wtihin the City of Cape Town on Saturday of or between 28 April and 1 May 2023. It will be a great help to know where there are gaps that need covering. Thank you, Margaret Fox.
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