City Nature Challenge - iNaturalist Competition – NYC vs 60 other cities April 27-30 The City University of NY (CUNY) Macaulay Honors College is organizing the NYC arm of the City Nature Challenge. Over 60 cities throughout the world are competing. See http://citynaturechallenge.org <http://citynaturechallenge.org/> and https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/city-nature-challenge-2018-new-york-city <https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/city-nature-challenge-2018-new-york-city>. Challenge: Have as many people as possible make iNaturalist posts of wildlife sightings in New York City between April 27-30, 2018. There are four ways that NYC can “win” this competition: most total observations, most verifiable observations, most species, and most people involved. Please note that I am not an organizer of this competition nor am I affiliated with CUNY. I am attempting to assist the effort by asking birders to each report a few sightings in order to boost our city's results. If you have never used iNaturalist but you are thinking about it, now might be a good time to try it. Even if you don’t want to use it all the time, you might find it helpful once in a while for recording the exact location of something you might want to re-locate. If you have a smartphone, you can download the app “iNaturalist”; if not, use the website www.inaturalist.org <http://www.inaturalist.org/> To use iNaturalist, you need both an exact time and location of whatever wildlife you have found - a plant, animal, fungus, slime mold, or other evidence (scat, fur, tracks, shells, carcasses). If you can take a picture or audio recording, you should do so, because without it, the observation cannot be verified to become “research grade”. Unverifiable observations will count for 3 of the competition categories, so it is still useful to make them. If you use the app, it will automatically record the date/time, your latitude/longitude, along with whatever photo you take with your cell phone. Suggestion: If you take a long zoom picture with a non-cell-phone camera, take a cell phone picture of the displayed photo in the back of your camera. If you use the website: You may enter a sighting with a photo from any camera without using the app. You would need to enter a time and location manually. Or if you used the app and posted no photo or a bad photo, you can update your sighting with a better photo. However you make the entry, you need to make some guess as to the species, family, or other grouping of the organism (“monarch butterfly”, “insect”, etc.) You can read more about this at https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/getting+started <https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/getting+started>
Nancy Tognan VP, Queens County Bird Club nancy.tog...@gmail.com <mailto:nancy.tog...@gmail.com> -- NYSbirds-L List Info: http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NYSbirdsWELCOME.htm http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NYSbirdsRULES.htm http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NYSbirdsSubscribeConfigurationLeave.htm ARCHIVES: 1) http://www.mail-archive.com/nysbirds-l@cornell.edu/maillist.html 2) http://www.surfbirds.com/birdingmail/Group/NYSBirds-L 3) http://birding.aba.org/maillist/NY01 Please submit your observations to eBird: http://ebird.org/content/ebird/ --
