Archive for April 11th, 2018

Texas Competes Against the World

Wednesday, April 11th, 2018

Join the City Nature Challenge in your region.

This is Passport to Texas

The first City Nature Challenge took place in 2016 between Los Angeles County and the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2017, 16 additional cities joined in, including Dallas/Fort Worth, Austin and Greater Houston. This year…

There are over 60 cities worldwide that are involved in this challenge.

Marsha May is a biologist and coordinator for the Austin region. Seven Texas regions will compete this year; the goal: document more species than other regions using the iNaturalist app.

We are competing against the world, and we’re also competing against one another. DFW is competing against Austin, competing against San Antonio, Houston—all seven of the regions that are involved in this project. It’s fun competition.

Go to iNaturalist.org to download the app to your smart phone. All observations made in the greater metropolitan area of each city—and uploaded to the app—will count during the challenge.

Then, all that data is collected in iNaturalist; it will be evaluated a week after the challenge is over, and a winner will be announced. Really, all you win is somebody beat somebody. So, everybody will be trying to get as many species as possible in their own regions.

The City Nature Challenge is April 27-30th, and a Nature Challenger rivalry is brewing in Texas. That’s tomorrow.

The Wildlife Restoration program supports our series.

For Texas Parks and Wildlife…I’m Cecilia Nasti.