The City Nature Challenge

The website citynaturechallenge.org serves as the global information hub for the project, showing the participating cities and the results from previous years.Participant guides, and news and updates about the challenge. Some of the content on this page is adapted from the global website.

• Raising awareness of urban biodiversity: To show that even in dense urban environments, there is rich and diverse life, including flowers, insects, birds, small mammals and more.
• Collecting scientific data: The observations collected provide highly valuable information for researchers, urban planners and conservation organisations. They help us better understand species distributions, population changes and the impact of urbanisation on nature.
• Connecting people with local nature: To encourage people to go outside, connect with their immediate surroundings, learn about the species that live there and develop a sense of belonging and responsibility.
• Empowering communities: To enable residents to feel that they are part of something bigger, contributing to science and influencing their environment.

Registration and planning: The Israel Center for Citizen Science is registered as the lead organiser and supports cities that wish to participate. Each city organises its local activities, volunteer training and public outreach for the challenge.

Observation and documentation: During the challenge days, participants go out into public spaces such as gardens, parks, streets and courtyards and look for living organisms. They photograph them using their mobile phone or a camera.

Upload to the app: The photos are uploaded to the iNaturalist app. The app suggests an automatic identification of the species, and the iNaturalist community (birders, botanists, zoologists, both amateur and professional) helps confirm and refine the identification.

Species identification: After the recording days, an additional period is dedicated to identifying the observations. Experts and other users review the records and help to confirm the species identifications.

Publication of results: At the end of the identification period, the final results of the challenge are announced and the ranking of participating cities is published.
Each city that joins the challenge competes with other cities in three main categories:

• Most observations: the total number of observations collected by city residents.
• Most species: the number of different species of plants, animals and fungi recorded in the city.
• Most participants: the number of different people who actively took part in collecting data.