Nature Vancouver Citizen Science Project – City Nature Challenge 2025
Have Fun and Support Nature at the same time!
Are you looking for a good reason to get outdoors that also helps nature and is fun for everyone? There is a great challenge for you and it’s easy and free to do.
The City Nature Challenge 2025 is an opportunity for individuals or groups to spend time outdoors, make observations of nature and document them in a way that allows others to get a better understanding of biodiversity in the Vancouver area. The City Nature Challenge is organized on a global scale by the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and the California Academy of Sciences.
By simply using either a camera or smartphone and software known as iNaturalist you will create records of what you see and be able to review, learn and share them with others.
Not sure what you may see, no problem. Your observations will be verified by other citizen scientists (like yourself) and specialists from all around the world. Hint: check out YouTube by searching for iNaturalist to learn more.
This challenge has become an annual event that happens simultaneously on the same dates around the world. It started with only 2 cities in 2016 but has grown and we expect upwards of 800 cities to participate this year. Nature Vancouver is now leading a team based on the Metro Vancouver Regional District (MVRD) area. The 2025 challenge will run from April 25 – 28, 2024 to make observations followed by time to upload and identify them (April 29 – May 4th).
Busy schedule, not an issue. You are totally free during the event to decide when and where you make your observations within the MVRD. We hope to see you on one of the walks by Nature Vancouver or other organizations that support this event. (See the iNat Project for details).
To make it more interesting the observational data results are tabulated and reported back to participating cities so that we can see how we do compared to other cities both in Canada and globally. It would be amazing if you are part of helping our MVRD team to remain in the top spot in Canada.
In addition, the data generated by you will be available to researchers, policy makers, environmentalists, teachers and more. You will be contributing to this and be able to look at all of the city nature challenge observations or everything else in iNaturalist. Your learning opportunities are unlimited.
Your observations are still valuable if you are not in the MVRD so please participate anyways. You may wish to see if there is a local iNaturalist project set up for your location or even create your own. If not, your observations will still be logged within the provincial boundary of BC.
If you are new to iNaturalist you can learn about this free tool at https://www.inaturalist.org
If you would like to know more about many more opportunities that Nature Vancouver offers, please visit our website at: naturevancouver.ca
To contact the Nature Vancouver team email John Martin at: john.martin@naturevancouver.ca
You can see our 2024 Results for the Metro Vancouver Regional District at https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/city-nature-challenge-2024-metro-vancouver-regional-district-mvrd
We placed first in Canada out of 40 cities with the greatest number of observations and species. Globally we ranked 45th out of 690 cities, quite the good set of results.
The upcoming iNaturalist City Nature Challenge project can be accessed at: https://www.inaturalist.ca/projects/city-nature-challenge-2025-metro-vancouver-regional-district-mvrd
If you can, please join this project so you have easy access to the results status.
Once we reach the start date and time window all observations made in this area will show up. Have fun, connect with nature and encourage as many as you can to learn about our great natural environment.