Citizen scientists: City Nature Challenge expands to include the Santa Fe area

The City Nature Challenge has grown significantly since its launch in 2016, and it continues to expand its reach in New Mexico.

Since 2019, participants from Bernalillo, Sandoval and Valencia counties have logged their observations from nature into the iNaturalist app, and this year, people from Santa Fe will get to join in on the fun.

“(In) previous years, it had been a hope that City Nature Challenge would expand beyond just the Albuquerque area,” said Vanessa Barela, who is head coordinator for the challenge in the Santa Fe area. “This year, we thought it would be important to expand the work to increase student engagement in citizen science with the public.”

According to Barela, several public schools from Santa Fe and surrounding areas will be involved, while the likes of Audubon Southwest, Mountain Kids! Santa Fe, Latino Outdoors and Institute for Applied Ecology — among others — will serve as partners. There’s also the possibility for further expansion down the road.

“There’s been a request for a few years now,” Barela said. “We’ve had some interest in the southern part of the state, like Las Cruces, but we just don’t have anyone to coordinate one (there) yet.”

The initial impetus behind the challenge was simple: to get people out in nature. For a four-day period — Friday, April 26, through Monday, April 29 — participants are encouraged to log all of their findings — which can be plants, animals, or insects — into the iNaturalist app, where they can be identified and observed by people throughout the world.

“What I think is really cool is the idea that nature isn’t something that’s separate from us,” said Selena Connealy, one of the co-coordinators for the Albuquerque area of the challenge. “People think, ‘Nature, that’s out in the wilderness.’ But really, there’s nature in the cities.

“You don’t have to drive five hours to interact with nature. It’s really just outside in your backyard or in your park. I like that part about the event, and I also like that it connects us to people across the world. So 10,000 people are out doing the same thing. It’s hyperlocal, but also this huge global thing going on.”

The challenge began in 2016 as an eight-day competition between San Francisco and Los Angeles. It went national in 2017 and by 2018, people all over the world could take part. The primary goal, according to citynaturechallenge.org, was as follows: “It’s a bioblitz-style competition where cities are in a friendly contest with each other to see who can make the most observations of nature, who can find the most species, and who can engage the most people.”

Participation can be as structured — or not — as one chooses. Observations can be made in the backyard, on the trail — or through one of the coordinated events hosted by a partner organization.

No special skills are needed, though participants are encouraged to take clear photos, use multiple angles and crop effectively in the app.

“There is artificial intelligence that can help people identify what they’ve seen,” Connealy said. “So based on the picture, AI actually looks at all the other observations that are related to that particular area or have characteristics that look like whatever that picture is and gives you some suggestions about what it might be.”

There’s also plenty of help from other nature lovers on the app, which can ultimately lead to a greater good: making discoveries in the name of science.

“Once you put an observation into iNaturalist, it can be accessed by anybody else in the iNaturalist world to both comment on what you’ve seen or provide an updated identification,” Connealy said. “But also it can be part of the broader research community in terms of what kinds of things are seen in our cities or across the entire world.”

Enthusiasm is still growing for the event in the Land of Enchantment. Last year, there were nearly 500 observers who posted on iNaturalist in the participating areas and more than 650 people who identified those observations. Overall, more than 1,500 species were named and 16,000 unique observations were made. Those figures only figure to increase with Santa Fe now in the mix.

“It’s actually really fun to just kind of watch those observations come in because it starts at midnight,” Connealy said. “Some people actually stay up to be one of the first.”

Adds Barela, “I’m excited because it’s a really great opportunity to bridge that gap between the outdoors and technology … One year, the kids found a bat, and they were incredibly excited that we saw a bat nesting during the day … And they continue using (the app), which helps inform scientists. We’ve found a lot of endangered species through doing this kind of citizen science.”