City Nature Challenge 2020: Liverpool City Region's Journal

Just over two days to go and the forecast is for a beautiful weekend! We've seen Swallows and House Martins arriving over the past week, Orange-tips and other butterflies are out in force while our spring flowers are putting on an incredible display!

The weather for this weekend is looking good, certainly a lot better than the storms we got last year! So we can expect an brilliant natural spring festival.

Obviously, we can't put anything out these days without acknowledging COVID. However, engaging with nature either from home our during your daily exercise allowance is a great way to stimulate the mind and open your eyes to what's around you.

The challenge is also a great way to explore those places you can't get to at the moment. See what others are seeing and perhaps help them learn by sharing some of your own knowledge.

Have fun, stay safe!

Wow! What a fantastic effort!

At a glance (as of just now) you have so far 163 of you have sent in 5,351 wildlife sightings covering an amazing 874 species. For a city on lockdown that really is incredible and it is great to see that participation is up on last year.

As we start to wrap up the City Nature Challenge for 2020 don't forget there is still time to send in any extra sightings. You have until the 3rd of May to finish identifying things and uploading photos. After that time the totals will be taken and results announced.

Also let people know that if they are unable to (or just don't want to) use iNaturalist i can import their records for them, but need their permission to do so. Let me know at info@merseysidebiobank.org.uk

ONLINE | FRIDAY 1st MAY

Wow! What an incredible City Nature Challenge this year! We are so impressed with the fantastic 4,363 UK residents who joined the global community of 38,000+ people getting outside and making observations of nature – while staying safe & keeping others safe as well. A huge THANK YOU to all of you!

So now we’re in the uploading/identifying phase of the City Nature Challenge and we still need your help to put all this amazing nature on the map!

On Friday 1st May meet some of your fellow UK challengers for the City Nature Challenge UK DataBlitz to help identify the records submitted over the international weekend. Log in to a series of zoom calls throughout the day for themed chats hosted by expert naturalists or bring your own beverage for an end of day social. Each Zoom call will be led my experts on taxonomic groups and will help get the UK total up before the final worldwide tally is announced on the 4th May!

Join the Zoom calls with identifiers across the whole UK:

10am – Mammals
12pm – Invertebrates
2pm – Birds
4pm – Plants
6pm – UK City Nature Challenge After Party

WHAT NEEDS DOING?

To make all the photos uploaded count towards conservation efforts here in the UK, we need to help identify the species people have been finding! You don’t have to be an expert to help ID – just log in to iNaturalist UK project and help with these tasks:

IDENTIFY SPECIES – Find photos of “unknown” and give them a coarse ID like “plants” or “beetles” or “fungi” – this will help those folks who do know how to ID down to the species level find those observations. If you can improve on or agree the current ID then great! Check out this short video on how to use the Identify Page on iNaturalist: https://vimeo.com/246153496
POINT OUT THE PETS – from goldfish to garden roses, mark anything that looks captive/cultivated as such
SHOWCASE SOME HIGHLIGHTS – add any interesting finds to the UK highlights spreadsheet to be included in the post event press release: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1x5VVv7emROZzs3BY_JSOiH5yfc8uXUTsIpcUUntSuFc/edit?usp=sharing

More information and Zoom call links here: https://www.bnhc.org.uk/bioblitz/city-nature-challenge-uk-datablitz/?fbclid=IwAR2C0n0mqjqVtkH8PQKGk_YwjD3YsMQ4Ee_GDUrs2by-ozHyS2JSPpDkfmo