City Nature Challenge 2024!

Hi Everyone,
Thank you for joining the project and we look forward to seeing all of your observations April 26-29! This year is the sixth annual Calgary City Nature Challenge and it looks like we have around 650+ cities worldwide participating. There are 49 Canadian cities signed up including Edmonton and Lethbridge in Alberta.. I hope that we can once again be one of the top-performing Canadian cities!

Each year, I am optimistic that we can achieve 10K observations during our four days. This has been my goal since I started planning our Calgary's first CNC event in 2019. Please try and make as many observations as you can to help make it a reality.

A couple other notes:
I have been a bit behind on promoting the CNC this year across all social media platforms. I am primarily using Instagram as a way to engage with photographers and naturalists and just starting to poke around on Facebook and X to help get the word out. All platforms to promote CNC and other citizen science events are under the username (@CityNatureYYC), so if you're keen please give a follow and help to reshare some of the posts. With that said, I do have the 2024 Calgary CNC Promo out now on YouTube. You can check it out here:

I also have the website up with some general info, FAQs, will be updating the event listings soon. Keep your eyes peeled. www.CityNatureYYC.ca

I'm excited for our biggest bioblitz event of the year and hope you'll take part! Please encourage you friends, family, and community, and colleagues to get involved and help to put Calgary's biodiversity on the map!

As another side goal for the year I am hoping that we can collectively hit 250K observations by 2025 in Calgary. It will be very close (based on current trends of posts coming in) and likely will require people to upload historical observations to meet this target. We currently have 167,000 verifiable posts (181,000 total including captive/cultivated and non-media observations). Across Alberta, 1 Million observations by 2025 is possible and I think we may reach it by the end of the year! There are 733,000 verifiable posts in the province but we had 206,000 added between Jan 1 - Dec 31, 2023 So, we may be able to do it but it will take consistency and dedication to make it happen. We'll need to recruit some new and dedicated users if we really want to get close! CNC will help but other events such as the May Species Plant Count, Calgary Pollinator Events, National Moth Week, BiodiverCity Challenge, and everything else will be essential to hit the target.

Again, thank you for participating and please feel free to reach out with any comments, questions, and ideas you may have! Best of luck this year!

Matt Wallace

CityNatureYYC@Gmail.com

Posted on April 6, 2024 03:13 PM by wowokayyes