City Nature Challenge 2019: Miami and Upper Keys's Journal

Hi everyone,

thank you for joining and participating in the 2019 City Nature Challenge! We have our new project page up for 2020 and we're hoping you can join the project page. This year's challenge will include Miami-Dade, Broward and Monroe counties, so we have a lot more ground to cover!

Be on the lookout for events and trainings we will be organizing leading up to the actual challenge, which runs from Friday, April 24th to Monday, April 27th 2020! We also have a website in the works and would love to hear from you if you have any ideas to help recruit new participants for this year's challenge. Please help spread the word!

Here is a link to the new project page, where we will be posting news updates to keep you informed about events and trainings:
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/city-nature-challenge-2020-south-florida

If you haven't heard about last year's results, here they are:
24th by observation count (12,171 observations total)
19th by species count (1,710)
16th by participant count (552).

That is out of over 150 participating cities, so it's really not too bad! We can improve though so let's band together to observe biodiversity and learn more about the nature in our back yard :-)

-SoFlo CNC Leadership Committee

From Shannon Jones, Frost Science Museum:

Hello fabulous City Nature Challenge friends!

Thanks for an incredible four days of observing our local nature! I am so proud of how much Miami accomplished… but we aren’t done yet!

So what's next? Well, we're done taking pictures, but there are still quite a few things that can be done before the challenge is officially over:

Uploading: Did you take a photo between April 26-29 but didn’t upload it to iNaturalist… YOU STILL HAVE TIME! They need to be uploaded by May 5th.

Identifying: The main reason we have a week between the ending of making observations and announcing the results is so that people have time to identify observations, get more species and make observations “research grade.” You can learn more about best practices of making observations here: https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/getting+started#identify

Steps for Identifying:
Go to our project here https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/city-nature-challenge-2019-miami-and-upper-keys
Click the “identify tab”

Once you're on the identify page, you can filter for particular taxa (using the "species" box or using the taxon buttons in the filters) if you'd like (e.g., birds, plants, grasses, lizards). You can also click the "unknown" button in the filters: to see all the observations that were uploaded with no ID at all. For these unknowns, if you don't know the species it's still useful to add a coarse ID like "plants" or "grasses" or "reptiles" so that the people who know these taxa can find these observations more easily to identify them.

A big part of identifying is also helping us mark observations of organisms that are clearly captive or cultivated as such. If you see a human-planted plant or an animal that's in a zoo or aquarium, PLEASE mark these observations Captive / Cultivated (if you're in the identify page).

Results: Whatever your numbers are as of 9am YOUR TIME on Monday, May 6 will be your results! We will send them out officially when we receive them 😊

Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns!
Shannon

Shannon C. Jones
Conservation Programs Manager
(305) 434-9514 | frostscience.org
1101 Biscayne Blvd. Miami, FL 33132

Miami you're doing great! The race is tight with quite a few cities at our heels (and we're at the heels of others) Any photos taken before midnight tonight count towards our totals!

Currently we're nearing 10,000 observations! We've far surpassed 2018 numbers -- 3881 observations, 952 species, and 203 participants. See the gripping competition standings here:

https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/city-nature-challenge-2019

So now, grab a friend or colleague and bring them into the challenge before midnight tonight. Here in paradise we've got birds, palms, bees, butterflies, trees, lizards galore -- show 'em some love!

Number NINE in the world in observations - 1670 so far
Number NINE in the world in number of species identified - 378! And we're not even seeing our marine species yet.
Number 17 in people involved - 95 - we take take this much higher over the next 3.5 days!

Show it off!

Hi everyone!

The City Nature Challenge begins this Friday at 12:00AM and continues all the way through 11:59PM on Monday night. Remember that ALL observations posted in Miami-Dade County and also the upper Florida Keys (down to Lower Matecumbe Key) will count for the challenge! If you have any questions about how iNaturalist works, whether it's the app or the website, feel free to join the What's App group chat with the following link:
https://chat.whatsapp.com/GkIDr5SUwog4rIql6gC1JU

Now is the time to get familiar with the iNaturalist website! Messing around with the explore feature on www.iNaturalist.org and using the different filters is a great way to learn about what you can find during the challenge. You can search plants, birds, insects, fungi etc and even zoom into your neighborhood or an area you want to explore and see some local observations.

If you already have experience using iNaturalist and want to set out to find species that you haven't observed yet, you can use the following link:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?hrank=species&place_id=2345&view=species&unobserved_by_user_id=YOURUSERIDHERE
All you need to do is change the part in CAPS "YOURUSERIDHERE" to your user ID. This will show you all of the species observed by others that you haven't posted yet.
For example, mine would be:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?hrank=species&place_id=2345&view=species&unobserved_by_user_id=joemdo

Remember, if you have any questions you can join the What's App chat to connect with other iNaturalist users!

One more thing: events are a great way to explore new areas but you can also find all kinds of things walking around your neighborhood or at a local park. Areas with overgrown grasses have lots of species of insects and plants that will help boost our numbers.

Can't wait to see everyone's observations :-)
-Joe Montes de Oca (@joemdo)

So many ways to join the CNC! Collect data on your own or join an event (more to come!): www.go.fiu.edu/citynaturechallenge

You may have noticed that we could no longer resist stretching CNC efforts into the Upper Keys. Oh the beauty of our city's natural environments!

It's coming fast. Mark calendars, gather your friends and colleagues, and plan an outing or three during CNC weekend. You can also practice using the iNaturalist app during Frost Science's MUVE program on Saturday March 16th, 10a-12p at East Greynolds Park.

See details here, and check out the growing list of events before, during, and after CNC Miami 2019 here, thanks to FIU's SEAS:
https://seas.fiu.edu/opportunities/city-nature-challenge/index.html

We've got a lot of great organizations joining the effort this year, including Virginia Key Outdoor Center, Rescue a Reef, and Miami EcoAdventures!

If you're interested in learning more about how to engage friends, colleagues, and the public in helping to showcase and record data on Miami's biodiversity, join the kick-off meeting at SALT at RSMAS on Virginia Key! Details here:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/miami-city-nature-challenge-kick-off-meeting-tickets-54657234259