2018 City Nature Challenge Results!

After four days of observation and three days of identification, the officials of the City Nature Challenge have tallied the results, and the winner is ……..the San Francisco Bay Area! They managed to win all three categories of Observations, Species, and Observers. You can view the leaderboard here to see how well all the other cities did. The Denver Metro Area held it’s own with an astounding 4,811 observations, 845 unique species, 310 observers, and 181 identifiers! Those numbers put us in 23rd place for Observations, 27th place for Species, and 20th place for Observers. Considering that there were 68 cities competing in the Challenge, that’s an amazing result! Especially for Denver’s first year!

Together all 68 cities collected a total of 424,544 observations, identified 18,115 unique species, and had 16,388 people collecting observations! There was even someone in Antarctica collecting observations of penguins and elephant seals. Denver had some really great observations as well including this grumpy burrowing owl, this muskrat on a mission, this shiny purple tiger beetle, and this zone-tailed hawk that sets a new record of northern-most iNat observation for it's species!

Denver's first ever City Nature Challenge was a huge success because of all of your hard work. Thank you so much to everyone who participated by making observations, identifying species, or just spreading the word. In only a week we were able to greatly increase our knowledge of how nature is faring in the Denver Metro Area, and this data could never be collected without the help of citizen scientists like you! Thanks again, and we look forward to seeing you all at next year’s City Nature Challenge!

Posted on May 4, 2018 07:47 PM by jesshawk