Submitted by John Martin – May 10 Update

Hello: I thought I would post the results from iNaturalist for this year’s “City Nature Challenge 2022”.Here is the link. City Nature Challenge 2022: Greater Vancouver · iNaturalist Canada

For the record, my user id on inaturalist is “NorthVanDad” and as you can see, I was able to post the most observations and the highest species count for this event. There were many great observations besides mine and from all accounts the city of Vancouver did a great job in its initial inclusion of this challenge which included well over 400 other cities world wide.
If you expand the map you can also see where all of the recorded observations were made. They were literally all over demonstrating a great level of biodiversity in our city.
I hope others will join in on this going forward.

The “City Nature Challenge” is held at the same time in many cities around the world. This year the challenge will be held from April 29th to May 2nd.

Vancouver and some municipalities in the GVRD are included for the first time. The general details can be seen at: https://citynaturechallenge.org/ and Fraser River Discovery Centre.

This event is a great opportunity for everyone (members and non-members) to help support our collective interest in nature. It’s meant to be fun and easy. People go out and record observations of any wild things on whatever camera they use and upload their observations into the hosting web site: iNaturalist (which is free to join). It contributes not only to a friendly match to see what city collects the most observations / species, but also supports citizen science in general. Scientists, policy makers, teachers, citizens all benefit with wonderful observations they can search online.

I believe many of our members use web sites like eBird, eFlora-BC etc. and iNaturalist is another online repository, but includes all living things. For more information you can use youtube or visit the following: www.inaturalist.org

I plan to engage in areas near my residence on the north shore including: the new UNESCO Biosphere of Howe Sound, Cypress Mountain Park, Lighthouse Park, Bowen Island and others. I hope to see you out there learning, loving and helping to protect our natural world.