City Nature Challenge: Meet Your Neighbors

We cordially invite you to participate in this year’s City Nature Challenge, April 29 – May 2. It’s an opportunity to take a closer look at the life that’s all around us – and make some introductions. Say hello to that scraggly weed growing in your sidewalk. Shake hands with a roly-poly emerging from their winter burrow. Tip your hat to a baby fox. 

The challenge is to observe and document as much life as you can over the competition weekend. Using iNaturalist, an app for your phone, you can take pictures of all the life you meet. Just like a good maître d’, the app will help you put some names to faces. It uses artificial intelligence to guess what you took a photo of and connects you to ID experts and enthusiasts to confirm what you found. Each observation you make will go towards an open source database documenting the life on our planet.

Want to meet some other people while you’re at it? Check out our list of hikes. Each group will wander with phone cameras in hand to make observations.

After a weekend of introductions, the Gardens are hosting a neighborhood bash to help identify the images taken over the weekend. You can join us too. From 4-6 p.m. on May 3, we’ll gather with laptops to identify what we can. No previous experience required.