City Nature Challenge 2022: Lower Rio Grande Valley's Journal

Congratulations and thank you for all the wonderful observations y'all have already made and shared to this year's CNC - as always, its been fantastic to see the sheer diversity of life around the Lower Rio Grande Valley.

We are now in the uploading and identifying stage of the CNC, which goes through May 8th (Sunday). The iNaturalist Help page has some great information about the identification system that I encourage you to read through: https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/help#identification.

Some key things to remember about identifications (IDs) are:

• It's OK to not know what something is and to leave your identification broad.
• It's encouraged to add your best guess of what you think you have observed.
• There are some taxa that are difficult-to-impossible to distinguish without key features being captured. For example, Tropical Kingbirds and Couch's Kingbirds can only be distinguished accurately in the field if they are heard vocalizing. Similarly, some insects can't be told apart without dissection or extremely detailed macro photography. Don't worry if your observation gets "stuck" at the Needs ID status!
• There are many, many observations uploaded to iNaturalist during the CNC, and it may take time for identifiers to get to your observation.

Please feel free to message me if you have any questions! We will see the official CNC results on May 9th!

We're doing great! I'm very excited to see all the observations y'all are adding to the CNC 2022 so far. Something I like to do (both personally and for our CNC summary report) is to ask you, the observers, what your personal favorite observations are. If you'd like to share, this year I'm looking for one observation that you made that you really like, whether because of the species, the photo, the circumstance, etc., and one that someone else made that really struck you. Keep up the awesome documentation of our local wildlife!

Thanks to everyone who has joined the project and already starting making and uploading observations! Remember, as long as your observations are made from April 29 - May 2 (as in, the evidence of the organism has a time-stamp in that date range), you have until May 8 to finish uploading them and adding identifications.

Thank you all for participating, and most importantly, I hope you have fun out there!

Hello everyone!

Just wanted to say welcome to this year's City Nature Challenge here in the Lower Rio Grande Valley. This is our 5th year participating in the global bioblitz. This year we are joining 14 other Texas urban regions and and hundreds of other cities around the world. Here are some things to remember for the CNC:

• All observations must be made in the Lower Rio Grande Valley (Cameron, Hidalgo, Starr, and Willacy counties) from April 29th (starting at 12:01 AM) to May 2nd (ending at 11:59 PM).
• Your observations can be uploaded during the 4-day bioblitz (observing period) OR can be uploaded afterwards, between May 3rd - May 8th (the uploading and identifying period).
• Observations can be of any organism, but please focus your efforts on wild organisms rather than domestic ones (such as feral cats, or dogs, or your house plant in a pot).
• For more information on the City Nature Challenge as a whole, see: https://citynaturechallenge.org/
• For iNaturalist help, see: https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/help
• For more information on how iNaturalist data is used by scientists, see https://cuefornature.wordpress.com/2021/03/27/scientific-use-of-inaturalist/
• For the 2021 Lower Rio Grande Valley summary, see https://cuefornature.wordpress.com/2021/07/13/city-nature-challenge-2021-lrgv-summary/

Thank you in advance for participating!