More results and NYC highlights!
First NYC journal post: San Fransisco Sweeps the CNC
Full results: Results Announcement from the City Nature Challenge
As I mentioned in the previous post, San Fransisco won in all three categories (observations, species, and observers). However, I did a little crunching of the data, and found a place where NYC comes out on top! We had the HIGHEST observation density of all 69 cities - 27.9 observations per square kilometer! This result is more than twice the observation density of the next highest city! Great job, NYC observers!
Additionally, we were in the Top 10 for:
- increase in number of people using iNaturalist (ranked 9th)
- number of verifiable observations (6th)
- number of Research Grade observations (10th)
Compared to last year's City Nature Challenge, NYC was most improved of the sixteen 2017 cities! We had 5.8 times the number of observations this year compared to last year! We also had 3.5 times the number of observers compared to last year's CNC and that doesn't count all the kids helping their parents make observations that I saw at the events! It was so great to see so many people out there appreciating the nature of our city!
Special thanks to our top observers:
@danielatha - 2,041 observations (WOW! Third highest in ALL cities!)
@irag - 851
@klodonnell - 754
@dskacc - 599
@craghorne - 551
@plnthunter22 - 492
@kenchaya - 478
@srall - 471
@dottiew - 455
@toastmastdi - 455
And to our top species finders:
@craghorne - 311 species
@danielatha - 198
@irag - 182
@srall - 182
@kenchaya - 159
@julietan - 143
@plnthunter22 - 142
@ariolimax - 131
@bronxzooedu - 131
@dottiew - 128
And to our top identifiers:
@srall - 4,842 IDs (WOW! Second highest across all cities!)
@susanhewitt - 1,413
@tusee - 969
@stamlerm - 734
@wayne_fidler - 597
@sadawolk - 586
@klodonnell - 534
@grrrly - 486
@zihaowang - 419
@elevine - 402
And an EXTRA special thanks to the Macaulay student volunteers and event hosts and leaders throughout the city. We definitely could not have achieved such great results without you!
What were your favorite parts of the CNC this year? Leave them in the comments below. I can't wait for next year!
Comments
Thanks for the number crunching and attitude!
I would have loved to contribute in person, but I was out of the country (in a small island in the Lesser Antilles) for four weeks, which included the whole CNC, and so I could help only with the ID-ing, and that only via very wobbly, very slow WiFi, which was out entirely for one day, plus we lost all electrical power for another overnight. However, I had three favorites:
Watching the mollusk observations and all the beach/coastal observations come in. :)
Being amazed and flabbergasted to watch @srall (Sara) in action. She lives in New Jersey, and she is an iNat superstar. She very kindly agreed to help out with NYC's efforts, coming into the city twice to travel around and make a vast and extremely varied number of observations. She also worked harder and longer at ID-ing than I would have thought possible for anyone! Sincere thanks and lasting gratitude to Sara, who certainly more than made up for my absence!
Watching @danielatha (Daniel), who managed to recruit in advance a huge number of people who were new to the iNat team, trained them, and filled them with enthusiasm for the cause. And also I was amazed to see how many observations Daniel himself was able to make! It hardly seemed possible. Please rest up now Daniel!
Great thanks go out to Kelly and everyone who contributed in any way. We did really really well. :)
I really enjoyed the chance to polish my IDing skills with so many examples of the species in my "home territory". There were a large number of plants (especially cultivated plants) that I had to look up to confirm significant characteristics at the beginning of the Challenge, that now I can ID on sight, thanks to all that practice. It was like a crash course in spring plants in my area.
But probably my favorite part was learning the names of new shells from @susanhewitt. Thank you, Susan, for getting me involved this year; I'm already looking forward to next!
Somewhere in the middle of the Challenge, @klodonnell put up some statistics comparing the five boroughs. I'd be very interested in those, if you were up to further number crunching!
Alley Pond Environmental Center was happy to introduce iNaturalist to its members and to participate as an early try in the Challenge. We visited Oakland Lake as a mini-challenge, and I invite everyone to come back to see the nearby Alley Creek Estuary behind our building on Northern Blvd, in Bayside/Douglaston, Queens. Our Ecoquest Club will remain involved.
@susanhewitt We definitely missed you! But thank you so much for doing so much ID'ing while you were away!
@srall I'm so glad you got the chance to come in and participate in addition to doing a HUGE amount of ID work!
I'm working on the boroughs right now. I'll make a separate post for it :) One interesting tidbit is that all five boroughs have the same most observed animal - the American Robin!
Here's the borough by borough post: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/city-nature-challenge-2018-new-york-city/journal/16431-nyc-results-boroughs-by-the-numbers
Am I correct that NYC is geographically the furthest north city of all the top ten cities?
If that is true, then we certainly deserve some special credit, because our spring is later and plus our overall fauna and flora almost certainly consists of fewer species than in the cities that are closer to the equator.
You are correct, @susanhewitt, we are the most northern city in the top 10 for observations. Go NYC!
And the fact that we got the highest per-square-km number of observations, does that also suggest that NYC might represent a smaller overall geographical land mass than many cities in the top ten?
Yeah, @SusanHewitt is very correct about fewer species due to our later spring. Especially this year, with spring about 3 weeks later than usual, many plants on the ground had not even emerged. There was less to observe. Just a week after the event I'm seeing things that didn't exist a week ago.
Yes, and all kinds of insects also had not yet emerged.
I noticed in the pie graphs of various cities' species distribution that we had a massively larger percentage of plants than most; mostly, I think, because of the lack of insects. It was also pretty breezy much of the weekend, which also makes insect spotting harder.
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