Diario del proyecto City Nature Challenge 2024: Ōtautahi/Christchurch

Woot! We just past the city's previous record number of observations, from the big 2019 CNC, and there's still three days of identifying and uploading to go.

https://inaturalist.nz/projects/city-nature-challenge-otautahi-christchurch-all-years

We've got to identify or upload 148 more species to top our species tally from 2019, and then 2024 will without doubt be Ōtautahi's biggest City Nature Challenge event ever. Well to everyone involved!

If you want more motivation to spend those extra hours identifying, or uploading your remaining photos, then here's Wellington, hot on our heels on #observations and still slightly ahead on #species:

https://inaturalist.nz/projects/city-nature-challenge-2024-te-upoko-o-te-ika-wellington

Also, here's the Eurasia-Africa-Oceania part of the global competition, where Ōtautahi is currently #9 in observations, just behind Prague, and #14 in species, with a bunch of cities ahead of us with about the same species tally.

https://inaturalist.nz/projects/city-nature-challenge-2024-eurasia-africa-oceania

So, keep on adding to our knowledge of the biodiversity of Christchurch and let's see how high we can take this.

:-)

We hope to see you all at our results night tomorrow from 6pm at Tūranga to celebrate the amazing results of this year's City Nature Challenge!

Get your free tickets to the event via Humanitix:

We managed to crack 20,000 observations over the weekend, thanks to Jon Sullivan getting around to uploading his 3000+ observations.

That officially makes it our largest CNC challenge ever! Check out all of the previous years totals here:

We are also ranked seventh out of Eurasia/Africa/Oceania

We are looking forward to seeing our online community in real life!

Thank you to everyone that contributed to this year's City Nature Challenge this year, whether organizing events, teaching workshops, making observations and confirming identifications. This amazing result belongs to you all.

Christchurch placed 26 out of 690 cities, beating Los Angeles, Melbourne and Wellington:

20,133 observations

2,307 species

421 identifiers

349 observers

Almost 4,000 different species have been found in Christchurch over the six years the Challenge has been held here.

Read a bit more about the results in this Newsline article:
'Web of biodiversity spun during city nature challenge"

We'd love to hear any feedback you have about this year's challenge. Did we get the mix of events right? Did you enjoy participating? Was our communication good? What can we do better for next year? Please feel free to add comments to this post.

Café Scientifique

We have one more exciting event offering up our sleeve! Wednesday 22 May is International Biodiversity Day and we are celebrating! There's an amazing line-up of guest speakers sponsored by RSNZ.

Lindsey Conrow – geographer at UC, talking about black-billed gulls
Gail Ingram – poet
Sara Kross – ecologist / conservation biologist at UC
Rebecca (Bex) Le Grice – entomologist and curator at Canterbury Museum, talking about flies
Morgane Merien – entomologist and science communicator at Canterbury Museum, talking about stick insects (and yes, there will opportunities to get a selfie with a stick insect)

The event is free and there will be food and drink available to buy. Book your tickets today