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Can I ask what the rules are this year? For example, does all vegetation have to have grown spontaneously, not to have been planted, even if it is out-of doors like an established tree in a park? And if so, can we make that rule clear? Thanks.

So, is there a page out there somewhere with a detailed list of the CNC rules? If so I would like to see it, if you could give us the link.

And although I will concentrate on photographing wild things, and encourage others to do so, for the CNC it is considered acceptable for me (or anyone else) to make observations of trees in parks, or in fact any well-established garden plants that are growing by themselves year after year, rather than those things that I can tell were raised in a greenhouse and then pulled out of a plastic pot and stuck into the ground. You will get other people's observations of those too, like garden pansies for example -- should I simply mark those as "cultivated"? What about trees that I know don't grow spontaneously in this area -- should I mark those as "cultivated"?

But I will tell people who are photographing house plants, that these cannot be counted towards the total, and encourage them to put their energies into going outside to photograph things.

I should explain that when you are in a place like Randall's Island (which for many decades was an ugly neglected dumping ground/urban wilderness/wasteland) it can sometimes be quite difficult to work out which trees were deliberately planted, albeit years ago, and which (like the White Mulberries) started out as spontaneous vegetation, aka weed trees, but have now been accepted as part of the Park landscape.

And Randall's uses wildflower seed mix in a few areas, and that is a bit ambiguous too, as to what is "planted" and what is wild.

I suppose these are in fact general iNaturalist questions, not just CNC questions. But because I am soon going to be co-leading a mini-bioblitz in preparation for the CNC, I want to have all these guidelines clear in my mind. :)

Thanks Kelly,

Susan

Yeah, these are big iNaturalist questions, not just CNC :) I've struggled for a long time with what to do about long established street trees, which as you know, are an important natural part of our habitat here, but were initially put there by humans. I personally think that these should be considered verifiable in iNat given our context, but no one seems to have a really solid answer to this. Maybe there needs to be a third category: wild, captive/cultivated, and initially cultivated, but self-sufficient :)

There is an Educator Guide that has a section called "Practice Making Good Observations" that might be a useful resource for you: https://education.eol.org/cnc_materials/iNaturalistWithStudents.pdf This document will eventually live on the main CNC webpage (www.citynaturechallenge.org). I can bring it up at our next meeting about having more clear guidelines on this main page that we can point people to. I will also add it to the project description above so it's front and center here.

As far as your marking observations as cultivated, I'd say use your knowledge of species and context clues from the photos, like you said above. In fact, I'm going to make you a curator on this project to make ID easier for you, is that ok?

Some of the metrics we can win with are:

of participants

of observations

of verifiable observations

of Research Grade observations

of species

Now, for that last one, we're using "species" the way the iNat project calculates species, that is, as "number of unique taxa." So if someone makes an observation and it's only ID'ed to a genus, say Pinus, and no one else in the project observes another Pinus, then that observation gets counted as a species in our totals.

Just wanted to add that "Verifiable Observations" means what you said (must include photo or sound) but ALSO these cannot be marked captive/cultivated. Choosing C/C downgrades an observation to permanent Casual Grade and takes it out of the count of verifiable observations.

I don't encourage people to do observations without evidence, but I do know that there are a lot of times where are bird flies by and you can't get a photo of it in time. I think telling people just to do it when they know what they saw is a good way to go and stressing that you can't get any help with IDs from the community if there's no photo or sound. From my interactions with new iNat users, most don't think that they can upload an observation without a photo anyway.

Project curators have access to some project tools and can see the exact locations of obscured observations. There's also direct access to the Identify tool for the project, which is easier than going to the Identify tool and adding a filter for the CNC NYC project to only see those particular observations. So not really "easier" - I should have said more convenient :)