City Nature Challenge 2024: Hartford + New Haven counties's Journal

Congratulations to everyone who participated in central Connecticut’s first City Nature Challenge! We are so excited about the level of participation and quality of observations in Hartford and New Haven Counties' inaugural showing, and want to share some interesting insights from the data we all collected.

The stats tab of our project provides a great summary and overview of what was found. Additionally, iNaturalist allows users to export observation data, which gives us the opportunity for a deeper look at our project. Data was exported on Monday, May 6, and may change slightly should more observations from the April 26-29 period be uploaded.

Impact of the CNC on iNaturalist participation: 2024 vs. previous years

Across our two counties, there was a big increase in iNaturalist observations made during this year’s four-day CNC vs. the comparable four-day period in each of the past two years. In fact, there were 5.8 times more observations in our counties in 2024 vs. the CNC time period in 2023. You can see a breakdown of daily observations below:

Checking out this graph, it looks like Sundays are big days for observations, CNC or not!

It’s great to see that the diversity of these 2024 observations was also high - there were about 3.1 times more unique “species” values during the CNC this year than in the same time period in 2023, and 2.6x more than 2022. See the breakdown by day:

*Values may slightly differ vs. what is shared by iNaturalist stats. This analysis included all unique scientific names, even if not specified to the species level.

This year’s CNC period also saw a larger number of unique observers submitting observations each day compared to previous years. Some of this increase can likely be attributed to extra observation activity from existing users - that said, a number of people who followed our project page were brand new to the app, which means that our project succeeded in attracting some new iNaturalist users!

The data analyst in me must make the disclaimer that this is observational, rather than experimental data. We can't make confident claims about whether the CNC actually caused this increase in participation - but it’s more than plausible that our new project inspired a lot of additional participation this year. One hint is that, while participation also increased this year in some counties without a City Nature Challenge project, the increase was much smaller than what was observed in Hartford and New Haven Counties. In Litchfield county, for example, there were 500 observations made this year between April 26-29, vs. 421 in 2023, an increase of 18%. In contrast, across Hartford and New Haven Counties, we saw a whopping 478% increase.

It's also apparent from iNaturalist maps of the relevant weekends that Hartford and New Haven showed up in a bigger way this year:

Note that Fairfield County was the only Connecticut county with an established City Nature Challenge in 2023, and appears to have a higher concentration of 2023 observations with respect to the rest of the state - more evidence that the CNC is driving an increase in iNaturalist participation.


Observation hot spots

Within our counties, where were most observations taken? In many, but not all, cases, iNaturalist observation data gives us a clear indication of which town the observation was taken in. That data is mapped to Connecticut towns here:

Ignoring the 11% or so of observations for which a specific town couldn’t be determined (“NA” in this table), the top 5 sites of observation were Hamden, Madison, Guilford, Meriden, and New Haven – all towns in New Haven County. Interestingly, Hartford County towns took the next top 5 spots.

Types of observation by county

iNaturalist groups user observations into some main “iconic taxa”: birds, mammals, plants, etc. This gives us the opportunity to see what forms of life were most observed in each county during the CNC. There are so many reasons why a particular organism would draw someone’s attention, that we can’t really draw conclusions about the populations of particular taxa in one county compared to another. However it is interesting to see this breakdown showing somewhat different rates of taxa observations in the different counties:

Plants were clearly the predominant type of observation in both counties. Hartford County had a higher proportion of insects and fungi, while New Haven County showed its shoreline side with more birds (Aves) and molluscs. It was interesting to see that the majority of mammals observed were in New Haven, too.

Conclusion
We think that the most well-supported takeaway is that the City Nature Challenge really does encourage more of us to tune into the nature around us, spend some time outside, and get a little more familiar with our non-human neighbors. Especially with the added knowledge that iNaturalist as a whole achieved record participation in April.

Considering that the only form of publicity we had for this event was emailing different nature groups, posting on iNaturalist, sharing info with Connecticut-based Facebook groups, and leaving fliers where we could, we are really happy with the amount of participation in this first year.

Collectively, we 260+ participants did an excellent job building up the record of Connecticut biodiversity this year. Let's plan to beat these newly-established records in '25! Anyone interested in helping to organize, please be in touch.

• Chase (@hexagonaria) and Sarah (@chiforager)

PS: This post is already quite long enough, but I (@hexagonaria) am happy to talk about methods or other potential analyses if anyone's interested!

As of 9:00 AM yesterday, the 2024 City Nature Challenge is officially complete! We can't thank everyone enough for your outstanding work and commitment to this project - as we have said before, we never thought we'd document nearly 1000 species on our first try. For the first-ever City Nature Challenge Hartford/New Haven, our stats are:

3,234 observations by 262 observers
952 species
311 identifiers

Comparing user data with the same weekend last year, our project clearly had an impact! The number of observations made in our geographic territory this year skyrocketed during the weekend of the City Nature Challenge - we are preparing some graphs to illustrate our project's impact, which we will share with you ASAP. I was happy to see that 8 of the top 10 most observed species in our project are native to our area:





Congratulations to @kellyfuerstenberg and @scmayo for placing first and second for the number of species observed, with 308 and 214 respectively! @ericpo1 and @codylimber topped the charts for number of identifications made, with 306 and 213 - thank you all so much for your contributions. I will get in touch with all of you via iNaturalist messages in the next day or two to get you your Wild Ones - Mountain Laurel Chapter memberships!

Perhaps most exciting is the fact that this April was a record-breaking month for iNaturalist!! In their April News Highlights post for the month, iNaturalist wrote:

"iNaturalist broke records this April thanks to an amazing City Nature Challenge. For the first time we logged more than 6 million observations and more than 400 thousand participants in a month!"

We can all be proud for playing our part of this record-setting month. We encourage you to read the April highlights from iNaturalist at https://www.inaturalist.org/blog/93798-inaturalist-april-news-highlights. There were some truly exciting observations made, including this Lagrecacanthops guyanensis mantis in French Guiana, the first living individual of its species ever photographed:





More insights from our project to come - for now, we will leave you with this infographic that City Nature Challenge put out, about international results (congratulations to La Paz, Bolivia for their impressive 5,352 species observed!)

• Sarah (@chiforager) and Chase (@hexagonaria)
  
  

Happy Saturday everyone,

It's been great to see so many more observations coming in from the observation period of 4/26-29 - we are up to a whopping 937 species observed!! As a reminder, the official count will be taken at 9AM eastern time on Monday, 5/6 - so if you have more pictures to upload, make sure to do it before then.

Thanks to everyone who has helped with identification - as of noon today, 57.83% of our 3,201 observations are research-grade, which is great! We want to try to get that percentage up as much as possible before Monday, so please continue to weigh in on other people's observations.

There is an easy way to see which observations still need to be identified/confirmed: if you go to the City Nature Challenge Hartford/New Haven page and click on "Stats", you will see our dashboard (screenshot below):





On the left, you'll see a wheel depicting our observations. Green represents the percentage of our observations that are research grade, and yellow is those that still need IDs. If you click on the yellow portion, it will show you only those observations that need an ID. Take a look and see if there are any species you recognize!

One more tip - if one of your observations is still not research grade, you can tag other iNaturalist users who are familiar with that species and ask them to weigh in. Just type the species name into the search bar, and click the main page for that species. You will see something like this:





At the top right, you'll see the Top Observer listed. You can click "leaderboard" in green below their username, and you'll get a list of the people with the most observations of that species. In the comments on your observation, just use the @ symbol to tag them and ask them to weigh in. I usually tag the top several users listed on the leaderboard.

Let us know if you have any questions about identifying, or how to use filters to see only certain kinds of species - and thank you again all for your help and continued participation!

Enjoy the beautiful day,

-Sarah (@chiforager) + Chase (@hexagonaria)

Hi all, thanks again for your wonderful contributions to our City Nature Challenge project. I didn't realize it last night, but it looks like the CNC organizers are still allowing observations made between April 26 and 29 to be uploaded - our species tally is now at just under 900!!

We know that some of you still have observations to upload, so this is good news. Please just make sure to follow the honor system and only upload photos taken during the official observation period of April 26 - 29.

We had quite a number of moth and insect observations come in last night from iNaturalist user @rayray - these are definitely worth a look. I had no idea the diversity of moths that we have in this area. Here are just a few that I found especially charismatic:

Straight-lined plagodis moth

Yellow-veined geometer moth

Arched hooktip moth

@rayray, maybe next year you can teach some of us how you attract and document all these nighttime visitors!

On to the identification phase
We are now in the Identification phase of the project - that means we need your expertise to help positively identify our more than 3,000 observations. If you have a specific area of expertise - birds, fungi, insects, etc., you can visit our project page and use the filters to show you just the observations in your desired categories. Then, you can look at individual observations and either agree with the observer's identification, or suggest an alternate ID.

If anyone would like to help identify observations but isn't sure how to do so, please respond to this post so I can help you.

Our goal is to get as many of our observations as we can to "research grade" status. In some cases, it may not be possible to narrow an observation all the way down to the species level - but it is still helpful to narrow things down as much as possible. For example, if someone has an observation that is still tagged as "unknown", and you know it is a plant, you can simply suggest the ID "Plants". That will cue some of our plant experts to weigh in.

Typically, in my experience, birds and mammals are confirmed the fastest, followed by plants, followed by everything else. We will need extra help ID'ing the "everything else" - so if you know anyone with expertise, please invite them to our project, and to iNaturalist if they aren't already on the app!

One way to get an ID on your observation faster is to look at the iNaturalist page for the suspected species, and tag the top observers and identifiers. To tag someone, simply make a comment on the post with your question, and tag them using the @ symbol, followed by the username (i.e. @chiforager).

Identifying may not be quite as exciting as making observations, but it is an essential part of our project and a great way to contribute! Thanks in advance for your assistance with this phase,

• Sarah (@chiforager) and Chase (@hexagonaria)

P.S.: I'm tagging all project contributors with at least one research-grade observation here, so that everyone knows about the ID phase.

@kellyfuerstenberg, @suehallam, @mcjamjam, @sarah190, @mary_vrp, @doc1790, @sarah4035, @wachta, @tiffanybwood, @william_dornbos, @magnerin, @rrn, @makeupbykristi, @chiforager, @audrey327, @evitols, @rayray, @teetee-mcgee, @amlisi, @k10d, @ezt, @kwg555, @sarahwall99, @hexagonaria, @unbridleddiscoveries, @kausha, @lis220, @jennywebs, @jonathan42300, @salix_scott, @nanbarto, @lukas3291, @cwyse, @scmayo, @aquarius98, @arachphotobia, @snakebird15, @ipsumo, @billiam, @yxlin, @arobey63, @emschumann, @dwtrapnell, @cecilydyer, @khopemartin, @abugail, @rileyghostie, @blovelandsennett, @hodag, @maddog1066, @flowergirl1515, @cescabis, @johnoverhiserjr, @wesley_j, @son_of_wasps, @jessbu, @jenkatja, @eikenella, @bafinnan, @ecowill, @bobby23, @melissaandjim, @kathrond, @the3foragers, @codylimber, @taah, @themicrocosmos, @mee910, @sam2044, @dirtwizzard, @danab, @fleischosapien, @mkromidas, @carina69337, @labdean, @abbyks, @davidreik, @jmmusser, @sushi_lovers_vt, @jlazor, @seanmorley15, @alextrouern-trend, @cat2953, @shin_alpha, @jessie92, @nofahz, @ketki7, @tim221, @sodistractable, @august2fly, @mollyzahn, @wawa77, @jill71333, @barb_lr, @calaise, @sara_fagan, @alexnovarro, @cichlidmike, @bonniezac, @clshafer, @jeffhoyt01, @cswood, @jacobsona727, @christinarnini, @corrief, @brandonhenry27, @irish_folds, @lucyhardee, @jmhtex, @corpdronemetal, @atdest, @silvercats, @shannon17352, @reeconn, @seanstoessel, @rebeccagelernter, @penzy98, @ajfeld, @kimberlymj, @okapimykapi, @samsmithonearth, @riley05401, @albert384, @jackie24, @tacimat, @kathryn_langlois, @mrbirder98, @condrus, @kristofz, @jmvanel, @mswomley, @gage98, @ellalavender, @mkollen, @sycamore_lover, @rferdinand, @elleryneiderer, @alex_lin-moore, @bellemarematt, @ericpo1, @dami_203, @uvm1978, @dbenoit888, @jongorham, @apocynaceaenow, @breezy1125, @jonathan, @jscanio, @watchmewatchthem, @charliebrowncb5

Congratulations everyone on a fabulously successful first City Nature Challenge! Thanks especially to the die-hards who submitted new observations right up until midnight - you helped us break the 800 species threshold in the final hour of our challenge.

We'll write a longer post with some highlights from our final day, as well as information on the identification phase, tomorrow - for now I just wanted to say thank you for a remarkable four days, I learned so much from your observations and I know many others will too.

Get some well-deserved rest, and we'll be back in touch tomorrow!

With gratitude,

Sarah (@chiforager) and Chase (@hexagonaria)

Good afternoon everyone - I just hopped on our project page while listening to a meeting for work, and saw that we have observed exactly 700 species!! Congratulations on reaching another amazing milestone!

I have been keeping an eye on observations as they come in, and thinking about what we're missing and how we might squeeze in a few more species before the end of the day. I thought I'd float a couple more ideas in case anyone out there doesn't have to work today and has the ability to move around:

1) So far we don't have a beaver documented - I know it isn't easy to catch a beaver, but they do leave lots of evidence of their presence behind! If anyone knows of a lodge/dam or even a tree that has been obviously chewed by a beaver, that would be sufficient to include the species on our project.

2) There are lots of springtime mushrooms that haven't appeared yet - we don't have a lot of control over the precise conditions that bring mushrooms, but if anyone knows of a great mushroom-hunting location, please reply to this post and put it in the comments as a suggestion for someone's afternoon hike! Splitgills, witch's butter, orange jelly spot, oyster mushrooms, inkcap species and barometer earthstars are a few examples of mushrooms we don't have yet that people have observed in our area in previous Aprils.

3) Pests and home-dwelling insects count too - my coworker made a joke about taking pictures of rats, cockroaches and bedbugs in Chicago, which got me thinking that we don't have any of those yet! This is, of course, a good thing but I thought I'd mention that these species are all eligible if you are unfortunate to encounter them!!

4) Don't forget about pathogens - if you see a plant disease or fungal infection, we want to see that too! Oftentimes the weird spots and growths on leaves or bark are evidence of entirely separate species - here are a couple examples from yesterday:

Mountain laurel leaf spot fungus:

Black knot fungus (grows on prunus species):

There are also lots of tiny insects who create galls on plants:

Goldenrod gall fly:

We're in the home stretch now, everyone - we look forward to seeing our final count!

We hope everyone had a great weekend of exploring and documenting our local wildlife! @Hexagonaria and I headed up to McLean Game Refuge in Granby today to add some more observations in the northernmost part of Hartford County, it was our first time visiting that location and it was really beautiful. Can't wait to go back, we didn't make it all that far because we were taking so many pictures!

As of 11:00 PM we are at 661 species - we are catching up to some of the more established City Nature Challenges in our area, like CNC Fairfield/Westchester and CNC Western Mass!

Special thanks to @kellyfuerstenberg, @scmayo, @arobey63 and @codylimber for responding to some of the suggestions we made yesterday and taking photos of mollusks, seaweed, etc. down at the shore - that really helped boost our species count, including a number of observations in the Chromista Kingdom.

Is it just me or does it look like these periwinkles from @scmayo are snuggling? :)

We're so happy that a couple of groundhogs made it onto our project today - Chase and I have one living under an old shed in our yard, and we've been patiently waiting for it to make an appearance this weekend to no avail. Our project wouldn't be complete without a groundhog - here's one photographed by @arobey63 today in Milford:

@Arobey63 also boosted our mammal count with a muskrat!

It was also another great day for birds, with several new species added to the project and many more beautiful photos taken. Owls are now represented with this Eastern Screech Owl observed by @codylimber:

@august2fly captured this Lapland Longspur, also a new species for our project:

@sara_fagan brought our amphibian count up to 8 with a Wood Frog observed in Bethany:

We are still learning about new plants all the time as we encounter plants that we didn't have in the midwest. For example, I didn't know about the bright and delicate Fringed Polygala, observed today by @arobey63:

There were also a few observations that I'm thrilled to have in our project, but also thrilled that I didn't personally encounter myself, like this Black-and-Gold Flat Millipede (seen by @kellyfuerstenberg, who got closer than I would have been able to!):

There are so many amazing organisms that you all have captured, I know you all will enjoy looking through them all during the identification phase of the City Nature Challenge (continuing through 9AM EST on May 6). For now, I will leave you with my most interesting (and smelliest) observation of the day - bacteria from the genus Leptothrix, which produce an orange slime (ferrihydrite) and rainbow-colored films sometimes mistaken for oil spills. More about this here: https://www.austintexas.gov/blog/gooey-slimy-colorful-what-can-it-possibly-be

Tomorrow is our last day for observations, so if you are able to get outside on a Monday and make a few observations, we may just surpass 700 species!! Fantastic work everyone,

-Sarah (@chiforager) and Chase (@hexagonaria)

Good afternoon City Nature Challenge community!

Congratulations on reaching the incredible milestone of 500+ species observed!! That is an incredible accomplishment, and it has really been a joy to watch your observations come in. I have learned about some new species and bird behaviors just from reviewing your pictures and notes!

Tips for more identifiable observations
We are hoping to pinpoint the specific species for as many of our observations as possible. In many cases, this requires multiple pictures of the same organism. Try to document as many characteristics as you can, with pictures from multiple angles.

For plants, take pictures that show the flowers, leaves (tops and bottoms), stems, etc. If you are photographing a tree, try to capture its silhouette, bark, leaves (if present), and any diseased looking parts (pathogens can be clues to what the tree is too!)

For fungi, zoom in as much as possible to provide detail on the color, texture, and shape of pores/gills. For mushrooms, in addition to taking a picture of the top, try to photograph the underside of a mushroom. (Note that picking a mushroom will not kill the organism, as the mushroom is just the visible fruiting body of the fungus.)

For example: the top of this polypore looks like it could be a number of mushrooms:

Looking on the underside gives a lot more clues to what makes it unique:

It can also be helpful to make note of what environment the organism is living. Identifiers may ask you questions about where you saw something - please keep an eye out for their questions.

Prize reminders

As a reminder, we are offering one-year household memberships to Wild Ones (our local Chapter is the Mountain Laurel Chapter) to:

• The two people who observe the greatest number of unique species (most species observed as opposed to most total observations)
• The two people who make the most identifications during the ID period of now through May 6 at 9:00 AM EST

@Hexagonaria and I are recusing ourselves from the prizes, since we are the organizers. Each participant can only win one membership, so if someone wins in both categories, the prize will go to the person with the next highest number of species identified.

Enjoy a great afternoon outside, everyone!

• Sarah (@chiforager) and Chase (@hexagonaria)

Congratulations to everyone on another day that far exceeded our expectations! When I set a goal for 65 observers today, I definitely underestimated how many more people would be participating on a weekend day - we had DOUBLE the number of observers as yesterday!

We also surpassed our goal of reaching 400 species observed today - as of midnight, we had 461 species! Thank you to @bafinnan and @kellyfuerstenberg for adding our project's first fishes, @scmayo for finding us a chipmunk, and @cecilydyer for adding our first frog!

We'd love to hear from you all about how you found out about the project - we assume that some folks are just regular iNaturalist users who happened to make observations this weekend, but we were also very excited to see that observations are way up from where they were this same weekend last year! So the word must be spreading. Please comment to let us know how you learned about the City Nature Challenge!

Before I get into some pictures from today, I wanted to point out some opportunities to capture more species:

• We could still really use some pictures of mollusks, seaweeds, and other shoreline creatures in addition to the wonderful variety of birds we're capturing
• It rained this evening, so we may have a chance at observing some more mushrooms! Remember that with mushrooms, it is often necessary to have pictures not just from the top, but also the underside of the specimen
• Keep an eye out for spiders - there's lots of arachnids not yet captured in our project!

Chase (@Hexagonaria) and I took a walk today at Sleeping Giant State Park, and were excited to add another kingdom to our project when we observed some slime molds! We'll need help identifying them - please take a look if you have any slime mold expertise:

There are way too many incredible pictures to share here, but here are a few that I was excited to see today:

This breathtaking photo of a Great Egret, captured with its stunning green mating lores by @arachphotobia:

This adorable Northern Parula warbler, captured mid-migration by @abbyks:

The wonderfully weird Juniper Apple Rust fungus - a bane of apple growers, but such a cool organism! (photographed by @scmayo)

"

Some lovely Bird's Foot Violets, photographed by @jmmusser:

And I know this post is heavy on the birds, but I loved this photo of some jewel-toned Tree Swallows by @codylimber:

Keep up the amazing work everyone, we are so grateful to you for making this first CNC Hartford/New Haven a success!

Hi everyone,

Congratulations on an AWESOME first day of our City Nature Challenge! Nearly 60 people made observations yesterday, with over 280 species observed as of midnight. You all blew our expectations out of the water - thank you so much for your enthusiastic participation!

We are especially excited to see that people are making observations across both counties, including lots of great observations at the shore. Here are just of few of our favorite observations from yesterday:

American Oystercatcher, photographed by @rrn in West Haven:

Osprey, photographed by @scmayo in Madison:

Six-spotted Tiger Beetle, photographed by @snakebird15 in Bloomfield:

Northern Cinnabar Polypore, photographed by @william_dornbos in West Hartford:

And...our most observed species of the day! The Yellow Trout Lily, photographed by @billiam in West Hartford:

GOALS FOR TODAY, 4/27:

• Reach 65 observers (ask some friends to go out with you today - let's see if we can recruit some more new iNaturalist users!)
• Surpass 400 species observed
• Get some fish onto our list of species, as well as some shellfish/shells from the shore, seaweeds, algae, etc.
• Document some of the common mammals that we're missing: deer, groundhogs, chipmunks, etc.
• Get some observations in northern Hartford County on our map: Enfield, Granby, Hartland, etc.

Thank you again to everyone who contributed yesterday - we can't wait to see what today brings!

• Sarah (@chiforager) and Chase (@hexagonaria)

Tagging all contributors: @peakaytea @scmayo @igor_kuzmin @paul_dennehy @bgaudubon @bdrury @chia @crazywolf828 @danielleschwartz @mmmmbugs @chewitt1 @johnkeisers @nasehenry @asio-otus1 @benmeredyk @mpintar @stomlins701 @hcoste @tsn @davidenrique @emmatrue @molsdon @jeleblack @pieceofmind @motmot @harper_j @kellyfuerstenberg @aguilita @hill_jasonm @rayray @roomthily @gzerbe57 @galanhsnu @nycnatureobserver @tim221 @lsueza @tockgoestick @gottafeedmycats @quiltedquetzal @douggoldman @williambee @konrad_k @jackcadwell @larry216 @moritz3 @grigorenko @radoslawpuchalka @don_marotte @ccantley @stephenluk @wildskyflower @suburban_witch @that_bug_guy @azik @aleconinaturalist @kayleenice @phalaropus_ @kaiokennyx20 @octagon