As spring weather rolls into town, weekend conditions will be perfect for outdoor activities, including one of the biggest citizen science scavenger hunts of the year.
From April 28 through May 1, Washingtonians and people in at least 445 cities around the world are being asked to help assess how local wildlife are doing by participating in the eighth annual City Nature Challenge.
People are invited to use their cell phones and the free species identification app iNaturalist to document and identify as many individual plants and animals as they can this weekend. The event is sponsored locally by the Woodland Park Zoo, the Point Defiance Zoo & Aquarium, and the Northwest Trek Wildlife Park.
The data isn’t only fun to collect, but also possibly valuable to scientists and their conservation work.
“By engaging the public in making nature observations in this global event, we help to generate more local biodiversity data than you would normally get on a regular weekend; people also learn about iNaturalist and then can use it more regularly to contribute biodiversity observations into the platform and different projects,” says Katie Remine, Woodland Park Zoo’s living northwest conservation manager.
The Challenge started in 2016 as a friendly competition between two California science museums’ community science teams hoping to improve patrons’ awareness of local biodiversity. Seattle organizations joined in 2017, and the zoo’s Brianna Widner says metro-area participation has increased annually since then, with 7,705 observations of 1,280 different species from 654 participants last year.
Historically, Washington has been one of the more diverse U.S. states; a 2002 NatureServe study found it was home to 3,375 species at the time, making it the 20th most diverse state with the 13th greatest number of endemic species.