Welcome to the City Nature Challenge 2021: Chicago Metro!
What is the City Nature Challenge?
The City Nature Challenge (CNC) is an annual, friendly, bioblitz-style competition between urban areas all around the world. It began in 2016 between just Los Angeles and San Francisco and has since expanded worldwide, with hundreds of cites expected to participate in 2021. The Challenge aims to engage city residents and visitors in learning about their local nature and to help all of us better understand urban biodiversity. Anyone can take part. Just upload observations of animals, plants, fungi, and other creatures to iNaturalist using the mobile app or website. It’s a fun and easy way to learn about nature in your neighborhood while simultaneously adding your observations of nature to iNaturalist's global biodiversity database. The official website is citynaturechallenge.org.
When?
Everyone makes their nature observations between Friday, April 30th and Monday, May 3rd, 2021 (midnight to midnight). Then, everyone has until day's end on May 9th to upload those observations and add IDs to each other's observations. Results are announced on Monday, May 10th.
Since April 2021 is eons away, join this project and you'll get dashboard notifications on iNat when there are project updates.
Where?
The following counties are included:
- Illinois: Cook, DuPage, Grundy, Kane, Kankakee, Kendall, Lake, McHenry, Will
- Indiana: Jasper, Lake, Newton, Porter
- Wisconsin: Kenosha
In previous years we've used the boundary of just Cook County, or just Cook + a few collar counties, or the entire Chicago Wilderness region. We do like the idea of not using political boundaries and following the hydrologic regions defined in the Chicago Wilderness boundary, but it's far easier to understand if your area falls within the project if we use county boundaries, and calculating some stats like observations made per capita are easier too. So we've gone with a slight modification of the Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN-WI Metropolitan Statistical Area.
How can I participate?
There are a lot of ways!
- log observations on iNaturalist using the app or website between April 30th-May 1st, 2021
- help other folks identify their observations
- attend an event during the CNC
- organize an event before, during, or after the CNC - we'll have a big list of events that are planned all around the region
- incorporate the use of iNaturalist into your existing activities, whether as an educator, during a habitat restoration workday, or when your aunt tells you about the flying squirrels visiting her bird feeder
- promote the CNC/iNaturalist among your audiences
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Would you like to join our regional organizing team, promote your Chicago area CNC events, or just learn more about the City Nature Challenge 2021: Chicago Metro? Contact cassi.saari [at] chicagoparkdistrict.com for more information.
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