City Nature Challenge Results

Hello CNCSOFLO Participants!

The identifying period for the City Nature Challenge wrapped up for us as the clock struck midnight on Sunday night! On behalf of all of the organizers involved in the City Nature Challenge, including Frost Science, Florida International University, Miami Eco Adventures, Miami-Dade County, and Citizens for a Better South Florida, a big thank you goes to all of the observers, identifiers and the organizations that put events together to get people outside, helping to showcase South Florida's amazing biodiversity. Our results were fantastic and we shot up across the board this year with more observations, species and participants than ever before! With the amount of competing cities almost doubling from 244 in 2020 to 419 this year, it was hard to go up in the rankings but we did improve by 7 places in the observer count category! We stayed in the same position for species count and we actually dropped 5 places in the observation count category despite posting over 2,000 more observations than last year!

2021 City Nature Challenge- SOFLO results (ranked against 419 other cities/areas)
-29th by observation count (down 5 places from 24th last year, so we actually did better compared to other cities last year)
-19th by species count (same as last year)
-22nd by observer count (up 7 places compared to last year)

You can look through the City leaderboards here:
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/city-nature-challenge-2021

One of the best ways to see our improvements is by looking at some stats below, comparing this year's numbers to last year's:

Remember, these numbers will change as more observations are added (better late than never- I actually just realized I collected some shells that I forgot to photograph!). More identifications will also continue to come in as the iNaturalist community looks through observations that haven't been identified yet (in the Needs ID stage- we still have almost 4,000 observations in this stage).

Besides going up in observation count (10,327 compared to 8,518 last year), species count (1,978 compared to 1,784 last year) and observers (582 compared to 472 last year), it's also nice to see we had a much smaller percentage of Casual observations compared to last year. Casual observations include organisms that are not wild, such as landscaped, potted, and garden plants, along with pets or zoo animals. Since iNaturalist is meant to primarily document wild organisms, it's great to see that more people posted observations that translate into more useful data. We went from 36% casual observations last year to only 9% this year, so that is a huge improvement! The percent of research grade observations we posted is also higher, even though last year's observations had a whole year longer to be identified by the iNat community... 52% compared to 39% last year.

I spent a lot of time looking through our observations and wanted to highlight some that we posted:
Titan sphinx moth observed by @ethankistler
American crocodile observed by @alyssacritters
Spotted mule-ear orchid observed by @rileyfortierii
Red-winged blackbird observed by @bmasdeu
Common bottlenose dolphin observed by @genesiscg
Burrowing four o'clock observed by @lauren412
A fungi parasitizing a fly observed by @noaboa
Euphoria limbalis (endemic beetle) observed by @jaykeller
Bluegill observed by @ericrupert
Cave swallow observed by @nature_is_awesome
Coffee-loving pyrausta moth observed by @kuchipatchis
Felimare olgae (nudibranch) observed by @caporali
Slender brown scorpion observed by @raindrops
Least bittern observed by @juddpatterson
White scroll alga observed by @lt422
Florida apple snail eggs observed by @dylannt
Flat-collared beewolf observed by @eridanxharahi
Tetragnatha spider observed by @fherrerav
Goldentail moray observed by yours truly :-)

If you found anything particularly interesting, whether it's your observation or someone else's, please post a comment below (only possible on the website and not on the app).

If you'd like to share this post with anyone, here's the link:
https://www.inaturalist.org/posts/51624-city-nature-challenge-results

Thanks again for participating and don't forget to follow CNCSOFLO's official Instagram page @cncsoflo and facebook https://www.facebook.com/CNCsoflo
Be on the lookout for more info about CNCSOFLO 2022 in the following months :-D

Thanks again and see you all soon!
-Joe

Posted on May 11, 2021 08:16 PM by joemdo