The City Nature Challenge is back. Can you set a global high score?
Grab your hiking shoes and camera and join the City Nature Challenge!
Can your city set a global high score?
The City Nature Challenge returns this weekend for another four-day biological blitz April 25-28.
The annual event challenges communities around the world to head into their own backyards (figuratively, or even literally) to see just how many plants and animals they can find, document, and upload to the “iNaturalist” app.
Participation is super simple—simply find any wild plant or animal in your community, take a picture (or even an audio recording), and upload your findings to the iNaturalist app with the date and time included.
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The goal is to build a better understanding of urban ecosystems and biodiversity while inspiring a bit of friendly competition between communities - in its tenth year, more than 650 cities worldwide have signed up, including Calgary, Alta.
Calgary City Nature City Challenge dates (The Weather Network)
“The cities are compared on the number of observations made, the number of species we can document and the number of people we can engage,” explains Calgary City Nature Challenge organizer Matt Wallace, who is one of many event organizers and experts who will work to verify documentations made.
“Then we also break it down a bit further locally to understand what we are seeing and where we are seeing it within the cities.”
The prairie crocus is one of the first blooms one can find in Calgary, and shouldn’t be too hard to find on the city’s south-facing slopes this weekend. (Connor O’Donovan/The Weather Network)
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The City Nature Challenge started back in 2016, originally as a competition between just Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Since then, the number of participating cities has grown every year.
Anyone in the Calgary metropolitan region can contribute to Calgary’s totals. (Source: citynatureyyc.ca)
In 2024, nearly 2.5 million observations were made worldwide by 83,538 participants who documented more than 65,000 species.
La Paz, Bolivia took the crown for the city producing the most data.
The ten most engaged communities during the 2024 City Nature Challenge. (Source: citynaturechallenge.org)
But while the friendly competitive spirit that helped launch the Challenge remains, Wallace explains that the data collected can have a real impact on the ecosystems around you by informing the decisions that impact them.
In six years of participation, Calgary and area residents have made more than 40,000 observations of their own.
“It’s really allowed us to map out our biodiversity on a much more fine scale than what was previously possible. We’re building an atlas of local biodiversity,” he says.
“So keep your eyes open for some early spring wildflowers, like the prairie crocus, spiny phlox, that kind of thing, migratory birds, and insects like butterflies, bees, and flies. You can even make observations in your own house if you’ve got a mouse, or a couple of centipedes, or something like that.”
Head online to see if your community is participating. You can also take part as a class or an individual.