The City Nature Challenge has been running since 2016 when it was started as a competition between Los Angeles and San Francisco to record urban biodiversity using the iNaturalist platform. During a 7-day period, over 20,000 observations were made of 2500 species by over 1,000 participants. In 2017 the number of cities involved grew to 16, in 2018 it grew to 68 cities from various countries. In 2019 a full 159 cities participated and then 244 cities in 2020. Last year 419 cities participated from 44 countries, producing 1.27 million observations from 52,000 participants.

Australia first participated in 2019 with the cities of Greater Adelaide, Sydney, Geelong and Redlands City. In 2021 Greater Adelaide had 174 participants upload 5,440 observations across the 4 challenge days.

Greater Adelaide will again be participating in the City Nature Challenge 2022. The challenge will run for 4 days from Friday April 29th through to Monday May 2nd inclusive. Any observation taken during this time that is recorded within Greater Adelaide will be included in the challenge results. Following this, from May 3rd through to May 8th is the identification period. This time is provided to allow participants to identify as many species as possible from the 4 day challenge period. The challenge is to see which cities can make the most observations, record the most species and engage the most people. Results will be published on May 9th.

The whole of the Greater Adelaide region is included in the challenge. This area (following local government area boundaries) extends from the Murray River mouth, across Lake Alexandrina, up the river, around Murray Bridge, across toward Mount Torrens, up past Kapunda, across to the north of Thompson Beach and along the coast back to the Murray River mouth.

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April has been the challenge month since the City Nature Challenge began as this coincides with the Northern Hemisphere Spring. Unfortunately for us this means the challenge will occur in Autumn and we will miss out of recording the tremendous emergence of life in our Spring. (For that, hold on for the Great Southern BioBlitz 2022). However this shouldn’t dissuade us, as in many years it is a Southern Hemisphere city that produces the most observations, species and participants.

Sign up to the Greater Adelaide project and the main City Nature Challenge 2022 project. The bioblitz challenge starts in 60 days.

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