The City Nature Challenge 2022

Having started in 2016 as a competition between San Francisco and Los Angeles, the City Nature Challenge (CNC) has grown into an international event, motivating people around the world to find and document wildlife in their cities. The overall project is run by the citizen science teams at the California Academy of Sciences and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. The CNC is an annual four-day global bioblitz at the end of April, where cities are in a collaboration-meets-friendly-competition to see not only what can be accomplished when we all work toward a common goal, but also which city can gather the most observations of nature, find the most species, and engage the most people in the event.

The Greater Adelaide region was one of the first areas in Australia to join the Challenge in 2020, and has since grown the event along with the iNaturalist community in Australia. This year, the Greater Adelaide region will join for a third time, creating a great opportunity to involve primary and secondary schools in the event. There are many opportunities to link this project to many parts of the Australian curriculum (see the Blog Great Southern Bioblitz 2022 - Increasing biodiversity awareness through Citizen Science).