FAQs

Biodiversity data is valuable! To date the CNC has engaged more than 364,000 people in collecting more than 7.13 million urban biodiversity observations, often bringing new species occurrences and range expansions to the attention of scientists, land managers and policy-makers. Researchers have used CNC data in their publications, demonstrating the effectiveness of large-scale community science projects like the CNC. Not only does the CNC work to engage new people in observing nature during the event itself, it highlights the value of this work and inspires some participants to become biodiversity observers year-round!

This year, the Columbia CNC will be held from April 25th-28th, 2025.
This is the same weekend all cities participating globally will be holding their respective challenges!

iNaturalist, often referred to as ‘iNat’, is an online biodiversity citizen science platform contributed to by millions of users across the globe. The platform is free to use and accessible through an internet browser or as a mobile app. Each record, referred to as an ‘observation’, is typically associated with a digital voucher consisting of a photograph/photographic set and/or a sound recording. iNaturalist is taxon-agnostic, covering all known taxa (including viruses). Observations are identified and verified through a combination of user input, including from both amateur naturalists and experts, and suggestions offered by iNaturalist’s Computer Vision, a machine learning/AI tool. iNaturalist data are openly accessible and used extensively to inform scientific research, conservation programs and land management; they are an invaluable complement to professionally collected data. iNaturalist data are accessed directly through the platform, or via external biodiversity data aggregators such as the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) or the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), to which iNaturalist exports a subset of all observations.

Mesaglio, T (2024) A Guide to iNaturalist: An Australian Perspective, Atlas of Living Australia, Publication Series No. 12, Canberra, Australia, pp. 81

While we love those apps, only observations on iNaturalist will count towards City Nature Challenge. iNat provides a single platform that can aggregate data from a variety of taxa. You're welcome to use any other apps you find helpful to find and record wildlife, but those observations and data must ultimately be transferred on iNaturalist to count towards the challenge. 

City Nature Challenge is all about observing wildlife (emphasis on the Wild!)

"Wild" in our case means it's not put there or taken care of by humans.

As a general rule, we want to avoid observations of People, Pets, or Plants that were planted by humans. We want to make sure we're creating high quality biodiversity data for our City! For additional info on what counts as "wild," check out this great guide. 

iNaturalist uses a community-based identification system. New observations automatically start with "needs ID" status, but can be upgraded to "Research Grade" status as additional users add identifcations to that observation.  This process is done completely by volunteers, and may take time! On average, observations on iNaturalist take a little over two weeks to be identified, but this timeline varies greatly on factors such as...

• How active the identifier community is in your area. Generally, the more active users there are in a region, the sooner observations there will get identified.

• What type of organism you observed. Birds, reptiles, and amphibians generally get identified more quickly than other taxa. Plants, fungi, insects, spiders, fish, mollusks, and others generally take longer, but this can vary.

• Whether the photos or sounds you uploaded are helpful with identification. In general, it’s best to have close, detailed photos that depict multiple parts of the organism, such as the leaves and flowers of a plant, or the top and bottom of a mushroom cap. Blurry, distant photos are often not useful for identification.

• How "searchable" your observation is. Adding even a coarse ID to an observation, like "Insects" or "Plants" will help users searching for observations of those taxa to find your observation. And because iNaturalist’s focus is on wild organisms, observations of captive/cultivated organisms do not turn up in search results by default, so you’re better off posting wild organisms.
  
  For observations to count towards the 2025 CNC, they must be identified before May 4th, 2025. In addition to encouraging people to go out and make observations, the organizing committee will also be organizing taxa-specific experts to work on IDs for Columbia's observations. That way we can identify as many observations as possible before the May 4th deadline!
  
  For more info on how the community ID process works, check out this useful guide from the iNaturalist help page

Globally, the City Nature Challenge is organized by the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and the California Academy of Sciences. You can find more information about the history of City Nature Challenge here.

Locally, the Columbia City Nature Challenged is organized by a handful of graduate students at the University of South Carolina! 

You can get in touch with the organizers by emailing colanaturechallenge@gmail. If you have questions, are interested in being a partner organization, or are interesting in contributing, we'd love to hear from you!