2017 City Challenge - and the winner is?

From April 14-18, people in 16 cities across the nation where challenged to find as many plants or animals that they could and document them on inaturalist. In the Dallas area, there were 9 counties that were participating. Over the 4 days across the nation, over 125,000 observations were made with the DFW easing out San Francisco on the last day to take the win for most observations coming in at just over 24,000 observations from 504 people of which over 2300 species were identified.. Included in the DFW challenge was the Heard Natural Science Museum and Wildlife Sanctuary.

Final Leaderboard: https://nhm.org/nature/citizen-science/city-nature-challenge-2017-leaderboard

At the Heard, we had about 8 Master Naturalist participate, either assisting with teaching others how to use the app to find observations or going out on trails to document the biodiversity of the area. We ended up having a total of 20 people that added 412 observations to the Heard Project of which 166 were identified to the species level. The Top 6 species identified were Diamondback Watersnake with 18 observations and the Pond Slider, Common Buckeye, thistles, spittle bugs and antelope horns tied with 5 each. Some interesting finds were the Least skipper, Prothonotary Warber with leg tag, Luna moth, unicorn prominent moth, big eyed toad bug, little brown skink, Spingwater dancer and green dragon.

In inaturalist there is a plethera of ways to view the data, but here is an overview of the Heard Observations:

Heard Observations.
http://www.inaturalist.org/observations?on=2017-04-15&place_id=any&project_id=heard-natural-science-museum-wildlife-sanctuary&subview=grid&verifiable=any&view=species

In all of Collin County during the 5 day contest there were 1852 observations covering 520 species from 91 people. Top observations were the mallard (22), diamondback watersnake (21), prairie verbena (19), cardinal (16) and common buckeye (16). Different sightings were the American rubyspot, lark sparrow, black necked stilt, bewick’s wren and western kingbird.

Collin County Observations: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?d1=2017-04-14&d2=2017-04-18&place_id=3024&subview=grid&verifiable=any&view=species

Thanks to all that helped make this event successful and add to the overall DFW count of observations. And keep it up as there are many things still yet to be identified at the Heard or other places n the area. I hear that there will be a WW challenge next year. Cant' wait!!

Posted on April 25, 2017 03:56 AM by butterflies4fun