City Nature Challenge 2019: New York City's Journal

Happy New Year! In the past few weeks we've welcomed several new partners. I just wanted to give a little preview of who will be planning exciting events for the CNC. Information for potential new partners is at the bottom of this post.

Just like last year, the great people at the NYC EcoFlora Project will be leading walks all over the city. You can participate in their LICHEN LOVE project right now and get in some good practice for the CNC.

In the fall, we were joined by the National Wildlife Federation NYC Eco Schools group. These K-12 teachers will be brining encouraging their students to participate in the CNC.

We will also have the NYC Urban Park Rangers leading walks in many of our city's great parks.

Last year, there were several great events held by the Alliance for Flushing Meadows Corona Park including night hikes, stewardship events, and discovery walks. More of those are coming!

The Randall's Island Alliance did one of the EcoFlora training events before CNC last year and Randall's Island is a favorite spot for some of our local power users. We hope to have a mini-blitz here during CNC. You can check out their ongoing Biodiversity of Randall's Island Project.

The Wildlife Conservation Society is excited to be engaging their teen volunteers at all five of their NYC parks in BioBlitz activities during morning meetings, and they will be training them to use iNaturalist to make observations on their own time during the CNC.

If you are interested in joining us, I'm gathering some information now to start planning. Please visit this page for more info and to register your interest: Information for Potential Partner Organizations.

If you'd like to get an idea of what kinds of public events happened last year, visit this post from our 2018 NYC City Nature Challenge journal.

Are you a part of an organization or group that you'd like to be involved in the City Nature Challenge this year? I'll be hosting two informational Zoom meetings this Friday (2/22) and next Tuesday (2/26) where I'll be discussing what the CNC is and how to get your group involved. The call should be no more than 30 minutes. The Tuesday call will be recorded and I'll update this post with a link that day. For now, if you go here , you can get the slides and some other useful files and links.

Here are the meeting details:

CNC Partner Meeting 1 - Friday Feb 22, 2019 10:00 AM Eastern

Join Zoom Meeting https://zoom.us/j/545595626

One tap mobile +16465588656,,545595626# US (New York)

Dial by your location +1 646 558 8656 US (New York)
Meeting ID: 545 595 626

CNC Partner Meeting 2 - Tuesday, Feb 26, 2019 3:00 PM Eastern

Join Zoom Meeting https://zoom.us/j/709131618

One tap mobile +16465588656,,709131618# US (New York)

Dial by your location +1 646 558 8656 US (New York)
Meeting ID: 709 131 618

We're looking for a few dedicated iNaturalist users to volunteer to be "borough captains" for this year's challenge. There is a lot of opportunity to expand the reach of our observations in the outer boroughs!

The responsibilities of the Borough Captain would be:

• encourage others to make observations during CNC by making a journal post in iNaturalist (your followers will see it and you can tag other iNat users in the post) and by using social media
• make many of your own observations during CNC
• if possible, arrange an iNaturalist meet-up, guided walk, or some other gathering to get iNaturalist users out making observations
• help make IDs at the end

If you're interested in being a captain, send me a message via iNat or email kelly.odonnell@mhc.cuny.edu