Gearing up for the City Nature Challenge

Do you use iNaturalist?  If not, now is a great time to start – we’re gearing up for City Nature Challenge on April 25-28, a worldwide competition between cities and regions to record the most iNaturalist observations between April 25-28.  BCTXMN is coordinating with other Master Naturalist chapters in the Austin area to get as many observations as we can.  We’ll be running events all weekend and you’ll be able to earn volunteer hours even making observations on your own.

Observations are just photos and/or audio recordings of organisms that catch your eye.  To get started, all you need to do is create an account on inaturalist.org, then upload your photos or recordings through their app or website.  It’s fine if you don’t know exactly what the organism was – iNaturalist will suggest an identification based on the photo and location.  Even a broad ID like “insect” is enough for other users to find your observation and narrow it down.

iNaturalist has great tutorials on creating your account and making observations.
https://help.inaturalist.org/en/support/solutions/articles/151000195690-how-to-sign-up-for-an-inaturalist-account
https://help.inaturalist.org/en/support/solutions/articles/151000192921-how-to-make-an-observation

It’s really fun to look for interesting things, take photos, and find out what they are.  It’s a great way to learn about the world around you, plus it’s doing a service to researchers and others who are interested in your world too.  Maybe the strange mushroom you saw on your hike is just the second observation of that species in the entire county – how cool is that?  And maybe observations of the spiders in your pantry will be used in research on urban arthropod population dynamics.  It’s all good.