City Nature Challenge 2021: Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland's Journal

City Nature Challenge: the results are in!

A huge THANK YOU to everyone who helped organise, participated in, and identified observations from the 6th annual City Nature Challenge! Despite the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, we had over 10,000 more people participate compared to last year, and for the first time ever, we made over one million observations in the four days of the challenge!

Here are the collective results:
Observations: 1,270,767
Species: 45,300+, including more than 2,100 rare/endangered/threatened species
Observers: 52,777
Most-observed species globally: Mallard (Anas platyrhynchos)

Here in Auckland, our results were:
1,805 observations
697 species
215 observers
Our most observed species was Kawakawa (Piper excelsum)

What an amazing community of nature-appreciating folks we have! An enormous THANK YOU to all of you! And a special shout-out to our top observers: @chantoya @greg_holwell @sdjbrown @nic_charlton @max560

If anyone has any neat photos from CNC please feel free to upload them here:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1jdwZZgqpr4XrbIJObtae9_-uVklAQozJ

Kia ora everyone!

Don't forget you have until the end of Sunday 9th May to upload your observations!

The City Nature Challenge started as a friendly competition between naturalists in Los Angeles and San Francisco. They wanted to see which city could collect the most observations in a short period of time. That year more than 1,000 people participated and collected over 20,000 observations. Soon, the idea grew, and each year more and more people across the globe attend. In 2018, the challenge expanded to 68 cities across the world. In four days, over 441,000 observations of more than 18,000 species were observed, and over 17,000 people participated. The 2019 challenge more than doubled in scale, with almost a million observations of over 31,000 species observed by around 35,000 people!

City Nature Challenge is all about embracing the healing power of nature while making a difference for wildlife. It's really easy to take part - all you need is your phone! To take part, download the free iNaturalist app onto your phone/tablet and start uploading pictures & sound recordings of wildlife. Your records will then be verified by a community of naturalists and you can also help people identify what they find.

Wildlife records are a really important resource to conservation organisations and charities like our own. They help us build up a better picture of how a particular area or species is faring at a local level and how they might be responding to things like habitat loss or climate change.

Check out the official City Nature Challenge video 2021!
https://youtu.be/yO45mO9BUJM