City Nature Challenge 2019: New York City's Journal

Hello 2019 Project Members! We are less than a day away from the start of the 2022 City Nature Challenge!! In NYC, we'll be trying to be our record observation count from 2019. Please join us in making observations April 29 - May 2! There will be free events you can attend across the five boroughs or you can make observations on your own. For more info and the event list, visit our project page: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/city-nature-challenge-2022-new-york-city

Happy observing!

Quick Links:
Main CNC Results Post
Battle of the Boroughs Results Post
CNC Feedback Form

Listen up, NYC! We have some great people to thank for making this year's City Nature Challenge: NYC so successful! If you haven't seen our results yet, check out those two links at the top of this post.

We need to thank our great partner organizations that spread the word about the CNC and hosted events all over the city. Here they are (in alphabetical order): Alliance for Flushing Meadows Corona Park, Astoria Park Alliance, Bronx River Alliance, Brooklyn Bridge Park Conservancy, Feminist Bird Club, Freshkills Park Alliance, Genspace, Greenbelt Conservancy, Lower East Side Ecology Center, National Wildlife Federation Eco Schools, NYBG and the NYC EcoFlora Project, NYC Parks and the Urban Park Rangers, Randall's Island Park Alliance, WCS Education, WSP Eco Projects. THANK YOU!

We also need to thank our amazing borough captains who led the way in our Battle of the Boroughs! THANK YOU: @xris (Brooklyn), @danielatha (Bronx), @mpitaro, @zihaowang, & @cesarcastillo (Queens), @srall (Staten Island), @susanhewitt & @craghorne (Manhattan).

Then we had our fabulous Macaulay iNaturalist Pros who volunteered at many of the events around the city. Many thanks to Ariana Campbell, Daniel Thomas, Kay Kelly, Sara Dhani, Sonya Wong, Lynette Lewis, Veronica Sands, Jarrin Ahmed, Monique Vilme, Olivia Asher.

And last, but certainly not least, thanks to all of YOU who participated with your observations and identifications! Special thanks to our top 10 observers (@nycnatureobserver, @srall, @susanhewitt, @irag, @danielatha, @spritelink, @elizajsyh, @klodonnell, @plnthunter22, @mpitaro), our top 10 species finders (@srall, @nycnatureobserver, @susanhewitt, @cesarcastillo, @zihaowang, @spritelink, @ginsengandsoon, @irag, @danielatha, @craghorne), and our top 10 identifiers (@srall, @djringer, @sadawolk, @danielatha, @wayne_fidler, @susanhewitt, @xris, @plnthunter22, @schoenitz, @klodonnell).

AND thank you for reading all the way down to here! If you have 5 minutes to spare, we would love to get some feedback about the CNC to improve our results next year! Fill out the CNC Feedback Form.

Main CNC Results Post

The Battle of the Boroughs results are in and Manhattan has swept all three categories again for the third year in a row! Most observations, most species, most observers!

Staten Island gets Most Improved Borough with a 367% increase on observations, a 217% increase in species found, and a 159% increase in observers compared to our 2018 CNC results!

Many thanks to our Borough Captains: @xris (Brooklyn), @danielatha (Bronx), @mpitaro, @zihaowang, & @cesarcastillo (Queens), @srall (Staten Island), @susanhewitt & @craghorne (Manhattan).

And congrats to our top observers and species finders in each borough!
Brooklyn: @lisabrundage (Obs), @xris (Spp)
Bronx: @danielatha (Obs & Spp)
Queens: @mpitaro (Obs), @cesarcastillo (Spp)
Staten Island: @srall (Obs & Spp)
Manhattan: @susanhewitt (Obs & Spp)

I'm posting our leaderboards below for the umbrella project and for each borough. Keep in mind that the species counts are different for umbrella projects (which only count observations identified to species, rather than observations that might be unique genera without a more specific classification). All data were pulled at 9am on 5/6.

UPDATED 5/7/19 4pm

Cape Town, South Africa has won the City Nature Challenge! They had the highest number of observations (53,910) and species (4,587). San Francisco won for most people out observing (1,937). Congratulations!

Of course, NYC is still the greatest city in the world! We did even better than last year! We came in 13th out of the 159 cities participating with the 8th highest observation density! Here are the results highlights for NYC. All data were pulled at 9am May 6.

Observations

• Ranked 13th globally
• Ranked 3rd in our climate classification (Cfa in the Köppen climate classification) behind Dallas and DC
• 25,803 observations total in 2019. This is nearly 4000 more observations than last year. WOW!

Species

• City Nature Challenge observers contributed 146 new (to iNaturalist) species for NYC!
• 1,637 species found in 2019. Three hundred more than last year! This number will likely change the most as more identifiers weigh in on the huge number of observations.

Observers
-FOUR of the Top 15 Observers globally are NYC observers: @nycnatureobserver (#8), @srall (#9), @susanhewitt (#11), and @irag (#14)! GREAT JOB!

Results By Area

• Observation Density ranked 8th globally (but two areas ahead of us do not include full cities)
• 32.7 observations per square km - even better than last year!
• For the 14 cities in our size category, we had the most observations and species! Here are the top 5 in this category:

Stay tuned for another post with more results from our Battle of the Boroughs!

Check out this awesome infographic the global organizers made!

The Identification Period of the CNC ends when our final data are pulled from the project at 9am our time on Monday. This weekend is our last chance to get our species numbers up by adding and confirming IDs! If you need more info, see the last post in the news here: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/city-nature-challenge-2019-new-york-city/journal/24422 We cut down on our unknowns, but we still have about 1800 of them and lots of observations that need confirmations.

The CNC lead organizers like to put together a list of exciting finds for each of the cities. What were your most interesting observations? I've heard of a few from @susanhewitt like her find of Flixweed (Descurainia sophia), which has not been seen in NYC since 1901! She also made first observations of some plant pathogens and pests: the first Violet Rust observation in the tri-state, the first observation of Red Dock Spot in the Eastern US and the first Box Sucker observation for NYC.

@datha reports that on the first day of the CNC he found a rare fern for NYC that had previously only been known to be in three populations. He found a fourth population in Central Park! https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/23149131

What cool things did YOU find?

After a great four days of observing, now it's time to get down into those observations and leave some IDs! Our final data get pulled 9am our time on Monday, May 6 so we have a few more days to get our species numbers up by making identifications. Click on "Observations" and then "Identify" to get to the identification page (or just use this link). If you're new to IDing, you can filter the observations just like you can filter the searches in iNaturalist, so you can find the organisms you know best. For more info about identification, visit this page.

Even if you aren't confident in your iNat identification skills, you can still help! About 10% of our observations are categorized as "Unknown" meaning they don't even have a course ID like "Plants." A lot of iNat IDers like to filter based on what they know best, so some people might be just going through the "Birds" IDs, for example. You can help by adding these course IDs to the Unknown observations, for example monocots/dicots or (even just "plants"), mollusks, insects, birds, etc. To do this, go to the Identify Tool and click the icon for the Unknowns (it looks like a leaf with a dotted line and a question mark) or use this link.

PS - There is still time to upload any remaining observations you have waiting on your phones or cameras! Get them uploaded ASAP so they count for our results!

Great job, New York, getting in more observations and species than we had by the end last year! I expect a few more observations to trickle in during the ID phase. I know I have at least 50 or so still to upload from my good camera. If you also have observations living on your phones or cameras, you have until 5/6 at 9am to upload them. That's when our final results are pulled to compare to the other cities. Of course, the sooner you get them in, the more likely they'll be IDed and increase our species numbers! Get them in as soon as you can!

NYC! We are in 10th place out of the 160 cities competing in the City Nature Challenge! That is AWESOME!
We're maintaining our faster pace compared to 2018 with almost 18K observations of over 1300 species!

Let's finish strong today! We're less than 2000 observations away from DC and then we'll be first in the East Coast!

I hope everyone enjoyed the much better weather yesterday! Just wanted to send a quick note to say KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK! We're still ahead of where we were last year after Day 2: 9180 observations of 827 species in 2018. This year after Day 2: 10,983 observations of 1060 species! Go NYC!

Today looks to be a little cold and wet again. Observe if you can, but bundle up and stay safe!

Great job, NYC observers! Despite the storm, we're already ahead of where we were last year. We already have over 3400 observations logged! This is about 400 more observations than were taken on the first day last year and that's likely with people still waiting to upload from today! GREAT OBSERVING!

Special shout out to @brianboom and @xris who tied for getting the first observations posted at 12:00:11 am.

@datha reports that he found a rare fern for NYC (https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/23149131). The brittle bladderfern that Daniel found now makes it four known populations of this fern in NYC. Exciting!

The weather tomorrow looks much nicer! I can't wait to see what we find! There are TONS of events on Saturday. Don't forget to check our list: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/city-nature-challenge-2019-new-york-city/journal/23350-event-list-for-nyc-city-nature-challenge-2019