We're #6! We're #6!

By now you probably know that we didn't win the City Nature Challenge this year. Dallas took the 2017 title with a last minute 1000 observation submission and ended up with about 23,000 observations. However, we still did great! We came in 6th place out of the 16 cities, which is awesome. We also came in first of any of the cities participating east of the Mississippi River, so we're #1 in the east. Woo!

The winners of the City Nature Challenge: Triangle Area, those who made the most contributions, were @coatlicue, @caroline322, and @gmskupien, with 862, 481, and 340 observations respectively. Congratulations! You will receive your prize soon - please check your iNaturalist messages if you have not already.

This year's biggest species contributions were made by @scadwell, @jtuttle, and @whiteoak. While this year's Challenge focused on the total number of observations, your intimate knowledge of the species you contributed is amazing. I'll send each of you a prize as well - look for a message from me soon so I can get your mailing address.

Some other interesting stats:

We had 23.3 times the number of observations in 2017 relative to the same 5 days in 2016. That's awesome!

We also had 7.2 times the number of observers in 2017 relative to the same dates in 2016. We ended up adding 97 new people to iNaturalist overall.

We averaged 40 observations per person (we actually came in third in the country for this statistic!), so you all made a LOT of contributions. In short, you're amazing!

Our final totals, at the time of the official announcement, were 7441 observations, 1310 species reported, and 186 people participating, though all of these have gone up a bit since then too. Overall, the nationwide totals were 124,092 observations, 8557 species reported, and 4051 people participating. We were clearly part of something wonderful and helped make a real contribution to the overall effort. The City Nature Challenge ended up contributing more observation to iNaturalist than any other days in its history, so we helped break some records while doing some fantastic work as a local team!

I'll be posting on the NC Museum of Natural Sciences blog about the CNC and all your hard work soon, so please look for that if you're interested. The CNC will also be featured in the Museum's magazine, the Naturalist, so we'll get some additional local coverage through that.

Next year's City Nature Challenge is going international, so we'll be up against cities in other countries, not just our own. In the meantime, please consider joining and contributing to the NC Museum of Natural Sciences' Natural North Carolina project here on iNaturalist. We're trying to document all the plants, animals, and fungi in the entire state, so it's a big job. We could use your help, so I hope some of you will join us.

Thank you all so, so much for your participation in the 2017 City Nature Challenge! We may not have won, but we showed the rest of the country that we have amazing people, amazing naturalists, and dedicated citizen scientists. I am personally thrilled to have been a part of this and I am so proud of what we accomplished together. Thank you for participating and I hope you'll join us again next year. I truly believe that, together, we can win this!

Posted on April 26, 2017 01:29 AM by chrisgoforth chrisgoforth

Comments

Way to go, Raleigh! You kept a solid and steady lead on us in DC, which gave us something to shoot for. Keep up the great work in North Carolina!

Posted by carrieseltzer almost 7 years ago

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