This is your global invitation to go exploring at home
The LA County Natural History Museum wants the entire world to go outside and have a good look around this weekend. They’d like us all to take a close gander at the biosphere in our neighborhoods. And they want us record what we find from now through Monday, April 29, 2024.
The annual event isn’t just a great opportunity to experience wildlife at home. It’s also a chance to provide critical scientific data about our ever-changing biosphere. From the City Nature Challenge website:
The City Nature Challenge is an international effort to document nature in cities, taking place from April 26 to April 29, 2024. The global event calls on current and aspiring community scientists, nature and science fans, and people of all ages and backgrounds to get outside and observe and submit pictures of wild plants, animals, and fungi during the Challenge dates in order to help scientists track real-time changes in our planet’s biodiversity and better understand wildlife conservation.
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Wildlife only, please!
We’re sure your lawn and landscaping are no doubt lovely, but this event is about observing and recording the wild things that call the world immediately around you their home.
Here’s what the folks at the museum would like to know:
- What can you find in your house?
- What can you see through your windows?
- What are the wild plants growing in your backyard? (weeds count!)
- What insects or other creatures are using the cultivated plants in your backyard as a habitat or a food source?
- What observations can you make along the sidewalk in front of your house or apartment complex? (Always be mindful of traffic and safety.)
While you don’t even have to go outside to participate, the museum suggests going for a walk, getting into the weeds and making a visit to the local park. And remember to look up in the trees, underneath everything, and get low to see what’s creeping and crawling down there.
Pics or it didn’t happen!
Recording your adventures in pictures and sharing them is the most important part of the challenge. Thankfully, iNaturalist.org makes that really simple.
Here’s how to join in from the challenge website:
Step 1: Find wildlife anywhere in LA County (or your local area).
Step 2: Take photos of WILD** plants and animals.
Step 3: Share your observations in the iNaturalist app. If it’s planted or taken care of by people it is not WILD. Mark it captive/cultivated!
Step 4: Learn more as your finds get identified.
**Wild means not captive or cultivated. Try not to take pictures of captive animals in zoos or aquaria and cultivated plants in your garden or at a nursery.
Download the iNaturalist app from the Apple Store or Google Play. If you’d like more hints on how to find wildlife and some detailed instructions on using the iNat app, check out this advice from the California Academy of Sciences.
By the way, we’d love to see and share your images of nature too. Check out EarthSky Community Photos to find out more.
Bottom line: This weekend, April 26-29, 2024, join the global City Nature Challenge and record the biosphere in your neighborhood to help track real-time change.
Via Los Angeles County Natural History Museum City Nature Challenge
Dave Adalian
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About the Author:
Award-winning reporter and editor Dave Adalian's love affair with the cosmos began during a long-ago summer school trip to the storied and venerable Lick Observatory atop California's Mount Hamilton, east of San Jose in the foggy Diablos Mountain Range and far above Monterey Bay at the edge of the endless blue Pacific Ocean. That field trip goes on today, as Dave still pursues his nocturnal adventures, perched in the darkness at his telescope's eyepiece or chasing wandering stars through the fields of night with the unaided eye.A lifelong resident of California's Tulare County - an agricultural paradise where the Great San Joaquin Valley meets the Sierra Nevada in endless miles of grass-covered foothills - Dave grew up in a wilderness larger than Delaware and Rhode Island combined, one choked with the greatest diversity of flora and fauna in the US, one which passes its nights beneath pitch black skies rising over the some of highest mountain peaks and greatest roadless areas on the North American continent.Dave studied English, American literature and mass communications at the College of the Sequoias and the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has worked as a reporter and editor for a number of news publications on- and offline during a career spanning nearly 30 years so far. His fondest literary hope is to share his passion for astronomy and all things cosmic with anyone who wants to join in the adventure and explore the universe's past, present and future.
