City Nature Challenge 2018

City Nature Challenge
Worldwide 2018 City Nature Challenge 27th - 30th April 2018

Here is a link to this inspiring TedX talk by the founder of City Nature Challenge, which should give you an idea of how and why it is happening: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jz6cRzd29WM

City Nature Challenge is an event originating in the USA and in 2018 it is going international. The idea is to collect as many wildlife records as possible from the city and surrounding area over a long weekend (like a huge BioBlitz). iNaturalist is used to collect data from participants opening the event to anyone in the area with a computer or smartphone.

I know that Bristol, Plymouth and London are taking part.
Bristol: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/city-nature-challenge-2018-bristol-bath
Plymouth: Connect with Jack on Twiter @jackapod
No link for London at present.

Some info about last year’s event:
https://www.calacademy.org/citizen-science/city-nature-challenge Last year’s leaderboard: https://nhm.org/nature/citizen-science/city-nature-challenge-2017-leaderboard

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The one I saw for the last long weekend and made me think the location I wanted to go to would be excluded. Don’t know where I saw it. May have been morning TV.
Today we went to Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park and then home via Regent’s Canal - early flowers included daffs, crocuses, violets and snowdrops. But most of these would have been planted at some time or another, so I think would have been excluded - there were quite a lot of birds. It was more a Facebook outing, not really fit for iSpot even.
And then the weather was most foul on that weekend, so even our dates would be wrong.

Yesterday then, after reading Jo’s comment and watching Lila Higgins’ presentation (EVERYONE
SHOULD) I went into my City.
So see my https://www.ispotnature.org/communities/uk-and-ireland/view/observation/755880/a-place-near-you
It occurs to me that there are quite a few inner ‘city’ posts in iSpot but not so many Graveyard ones - so can I feel the Nation’s Graveyard Organisms project coming - anyone?

Graveyard lichens are generally ptolific although sometimes parish councils think that cleaned gravestones are a good idea; disaster!

I had a trip to Devon or was it Dorset - some place starting with a D - and took some lichen pics there - I get bogged down trying to find names and then stop posting. Not much at Tower Hamlets (checked again yesterday), but maybe when the weather improves I’ll take a trip to Brompton https://www.royalparks.org.uk/parks/brompton-cemetery/about-brompton-cemetery - so much to do!!!

I’d say, stay away from Lichens, they are a complete waste of time, no-one ever posts them.:fearful:
Anyway, I popped in again today, on the way to proper Observations of Marine Algae and found trees, remember those?
Of course, if you find a bird, you will get agreements galore - birds mean agreements, no comments mind!

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I’ve really got bogged down tonight - was looking at Gigi’s posts from Cape Point - and now I remember why I never got anywhere with AIZOACEAE.
It’s all about the fruit. Priscilla was always sucking them (the fruit) to see if they opened.

BEWARE @miked
Notice that Gigi is tagging iNat - see it here


Are posts being ‘marked’ for Export? Will a clever piece of software copy them across and then Unpublish the iSpot version? Only Gigi is using the Tag at the mo.

Copying across seems reasonable; why should anyone then remove it from iSpot. I thought the etiquette was once published it was there for posterity.

Yes, I believe so and I may have made a mistake. Tagging is an innocent way of bringing posts together for whatever reason.
I don’t think there is anything sinister but I wanted raise the possibility, so I flagged it for miked, though retrospectively I should have raised it privately.

The etiquette is that I would agree. But formally the poster owns the intellectual property in their post and can remove it if they want. There used to be something in the help files on this.