Final counts and prizes!

As of 9:00 AM yesterday, the 2024 City Nature Challenge is officially complete! We can't thank everyone enough for your outstanding work and commitment to this project - as we have said before, we never thought we'd document nearly 1000 species on our first try. For the first-ever City Nature Challenge Hartford/New Haven, our stats are:

3,234 observations by 262 observers
952 species
311 identifiers

Comparing user data with the same weekend last year, our project clearly had an impact! The number of observations made in our geographic territory this year skyrocketed during the weekend of the City Nature Challenge - we are preparing some graphs to illustrate our project's impact, which we will share with you ASAP. I was happy to see that 8 of the top 10 most observed species in our project are native to our area:





Congratulations to @kellyfuerstenberg and @scmayo for placing first and second for the number of species observed, with 308 and 214 respectively! @ericpo1 and @codylimber topped the charts for number of identifications made, with 306 and 213 - thank you all so much for your contributions. I will get in touch with all of you via iNaturalist messages in the next day or two to get you your Wild Ones - Mountain Laurel Chapter memberships!

Perhaps most exciting is the fact that this April was a record-breaking month for iNaturalist!! In their April News Highlights post for the month, iNaturalist wrote:

"iNaturalist broke records this April thanks to an amazing City Nature Challenge. For the first time we logged more than 6 million observations and more than 400 thousand participants in a month!"

We can all be proud for playing our part of this record-setting month. We encourage you to read the April highlights from iNaturalist at https://www.inaturalist.org/blog/93798-inaturalist-april-news-highlights. There were some truly exciting observations made, including this Lagrecacanthops guyanensis mantis in French Guiana, the first living individual of its species ever photographed:





More insights from our project to come - for now, we will leave you with this infographic that City Nature Challenge put out, about international results (congratulations to La Paz, Bolivia for their impressive 5,352 species observed!)

• Sarah (@chiforager) and Chase (@hexagonaria)
  
  

Posted on May 7, 2024 01:18 PM by chiforager