City Nature Challenge 2022: Southern Overberg's Journal

First of all a big thank you to everybody for joining our events and for making it such jolly good fun!

The big upload has been happening since Tuesday. We faced a huge backlog of casual observations without any id’s by Thursday morning. Only a few observations were at research grade.

With the help of Crew and event leaders we helped to lift most observations up to genus level. We then noticed that more experts from elsewhere were helping us. The quality then snowballed all the way through the 2800 observations of 38 observers by late Thursday.

The best surprise was when a large batch of observations started rolling in on Friday morning. And it is still rolling in. These guys are experts themselves and the species are all way-out complicated. We need help from all the experts out there!

With only 2 days left, we are standing at 3400 observations. But we still need to firm up id’s for half of them.
Help us make them count!

Now that the results are out, we congratulate all our Southern Overberg observers, winners and expert identifiers! A huge thank you to all of you for putting us in 6th place out of 20 cities in Southern Africa!

Some interesting insights:

• average observations per observer: 95
• every 5th observation was of a different species
• 99.5% of observations were verifiable
• 55.6% of observations achieved research grade
• 14.7% of observations were of threatened species
• we also rocked the boat with all our faves!

You may look at the World collective results of 445 cities here: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/city-nature-challenge-2022/journal

See the prizes won by Southern Overberg CNC winners here: https://www.facebook.com/BotSocSouthernOverberg

See all the fun we had as Southern Overberg Citizen Scientists on our Facebook group here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/505495607943867

It is exciting that Southern Overberg has been extended into the larger Overberg for the upcoming Great Southern Bioblitz from 28-31 October 2022. The area now more or less includes the Overberg District without the Overstrand.

We want all our members of the past City Nature Challenge (CNC) in the Southern Overberg to also become members of our first Great Southern Bioblitz (GSB) in the Overberg.

But first, read more about our scope for this GSB in the Overberg. If you like what you’ve read and want to stay informed about our plans, then click on join. Also click on membership and select to receive project journal notifications.
Here is the link to read more: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/great-southern-bioblitz-2022-overberg