Calgary included in the City Nature Challenge that kicks off in 667 cities around the world tracking global biodiversity

A  four day global challenge that's one of the largest citizen science events on the planet kicks off Friday, running from April 26th to the 29th.

Kaya Konopnicki, the president of Nature Calgary, says people living in 48 countries are competing to see which city has the most urban biodiversity, including 40 Canadian cities.

"It's a global competition so we're competing against cities from all around the world," she said. "But really what we're competing against is Edmonton.

"We want to beat Edmonton and see if we can get more data than them," she added. "We had a lot of participants in the past years, we've surpassed over 10,000 checklists and we hope to do that again this year."

Sharing and learning

Throughout the challenge, citizens connect with nature by sharing and learning about plants, insects and animals around them.

Those observations are recorded through photographs and then uploaded onto the iNaturealist app. That documentation is then shared around the world and used by researchers and scientists to track biodiversity.

"Maybe you find a bug in your backyard or inside your house or maybe you're going out to a city park and taking pictures of the flowers, the trees, of the birds," said Konopnicki. "All of that is valid and all of it can be uploaded to the iNaturalist app.

 "Even that little picture you take of that tiny fly or bee can actually make a difference," Konopnicki added. "That's what they found with iNaturalist globally, is sometimes people are documenting species that have never been seen before."

Staggering numbers

In 2023 the City Nature Challenge saw close to 70,000 people submit 1.8 million observations, documenting at least 60,000 species globally, this year organizers are hoping for two million observations to be recorded.

Greg Wagner is a biologist and the volunteer caretaker for Frank Lake. He's one of the scientists who use the data collected for the challenge.

"It's good, cheap, free data that we're not having to pay for," he said. "It's just people out doing things they enjoy and in the process of doing it, collecting a ton of data."

Wagner spends a lot of his time at Frank Lake and is hosting a group of birders who've signed up for the challenge to talk about the ecosystem that's been identified as an Important Bird Area (IBA) for two reasons.

"One, because a large concentrations of birds occur here, things like Franklin's gulls, this is one of the largest Franklin gulls colony in the world," he said. "Secondly, there's a lot of at risk or endangered species here, over a quarter of the birds that occur here are considered provincially, or federally at risk, they have some sort of designation."

Useful data

Wagner says all the data collected goes to good use by him and other biologists.

"The documentation of what's here furthers our ability to conserve this area," he said. "It makes a case that it should be preserved and also just a knowledge base that we could pass on and tell people."

Doug Lawson is retired and describes himself as a novice birder. He says a lot of Calgarians don't know Frank Lake and how great a resource it is for wildlife.

"So we come out and we take pictures, not only of the birds and the other mammals we see, but all the plants and lichen and things like that," he said. "All that information goes into a database that is readily accessible to people who are doing research."

Lawson says the fact that it's a challenge is fun and he's hopeful more people sign up to take part and record what they find.

"The more people with cameras, the more information you have and information is data and if we can get people to sharing in the iNaturalist app, that data isn't lost, it's shared everywhere around the world," he said. "I don't have the knowledge to be able to do that research but other people do and helping out makes you feel good, for sure."

Back story

The City Nature Challenge was established by the California Academy of Sciences and Natural Museum of Los Angeles in 2016. Calgary has taken part for six years and ranks well among other Canadian cities.

"We're near the top and we either have the most participants or the most sightings," Konopnicki said. "That's going up against cities like Toronto and Montreal, cities that have a lot more people and they're a little bit farther ahead in their spring and yet we're still getting a lot of people participating and a lot of observations."

Konopnicki says Nature Calgary's mandate to is to educate people and to get them to record what they see all over, not just in their own backyard, but around their neighbourhoods and areas all over the province.

Learn more about the City Nature Challenge here: https://www.citynatureyyc.ca/