Santa Clara County Bio-Blitz's Journal

This Friday is first day of the fourth City Nature Challenge, a friendly competition to see which metro area can rack up the most observations, species, and participants in those four days. This year it's once again an international competition with 162 locations participating (more than twice that of last year!). In Santa Clara County there are a few organized events:

4/27

Palo Alto Foothills Park

4/28
Ulistac Natural Area (north San Jose/Alvisoish area)

4/29
Hellyer County Park (south San Jose)

It's absolutely gorgeous out, still lush and green and full of flowers, and I highly encourage everyone to get out and do a little exploration! Even just an evening walk in your own neighborhood can turn up some birds or flowers you've maybe never seen before.

Here's the SF Bay Area portion of the City Nature Challenge, where you can find a list of events in other counties & check out the leaderboard & observations as they start coming in:
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/city-nature-challenge-2019-san-francisco-bay-area

Here's the overall event, where you can see worldwide observations & leaderboards and how we rank:
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/city-nature-challenge-2019

This Friday is the first day of the third City Nature Challenge, a friendly competition to see which metro area can rack up the most observations, species, and participants in those four days. This year it's an international competition with ~70 locations participating, including Antarctica (stretching the definition of "city" quite a bit, but who cares!). In Santa Clara County there are a few organized events:

4/28
Palo Alto Baylands

4/29
Palo Alto Foothills Park
Coyote Meadows in San Jose

Besides those events and others in neighboring counties, the wildflowers are blooming, the meadows are green and full of butterflies and lizards, and I highly encourage everyone to go for a walk in their neighborhood or any of our lovely open space preserves and enjoy the wonderful spring weather!

Here's the SF Bay Area portion of the City Nature Challenge, where you can find a list of events in other counties & check out the leaderboard & observations as they start coming in:
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/city-nature-challenge-2018-san-francisco-bay-area

Here's the overall event, where you can see worldwide observations & leaderboards and how we rank:
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/city-nature-challenge-2018

And here are the results from 2017 and 2016, for comparison:
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/city-nature-challenge-2017-umbrella (a nice bar graph of the results here)
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/city-nature-challenge-2016

P.S. #beatLA, and... #beatSanMateo? Last year Santa Clara County was 5th place in everything amongst Bay Area counties, and I'm sure we can rise in the rankings!

San Mateo:

4799 observations, 1008 species, 145 people
Marin:

3929 obs, 870 sp, 151 pp
San Francisco:
3903 obs, 721 sp, 172 pp
Alameda:

2410 obs, 720 sp, 92 pp
Santa Clara:

2290 obs, 718 sp, 104 pp
Contra Costa:

2012 obs, 620 sp, 60 pp
Sonoma:

1973 obs , 711 sp, 104 pp
Napa:

343 obs, 204 sp, 21 pp
Solano:

262 obs, 174 sp, 13 pp