Passport to Texas

There’s plenty of wildlife and plant life in cities and the City Nature Challenge proved it.

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This is Passport to Texas

More than two thousand Texans uploaded tens of thousands of observations of plants and animals to iNaturalist.org during the annual worldwide City Nature

Challenge in April. Texas made a good showing in two of the three categories.

Number two in number of observations was Dallas Fort Worth they came in just behind San Francisco. And then for number of species Houston came in second, also behind San Francisco.

San Francisco also came out on top for number of participants. Marsha May, a Texas Nature Tracker biologist with Texas Parks and Wildlife, coordinated the Austin region.

There was one woman from Austin who amazed me. She pretty much covered the whole area: from far west Blanco County to far east Bastrop Country. She went to all these state parks. She was just constantly out there. She had a microscope that she had out in the field so she could get these entire little organisms. Unbelievable!

Overall, 17,000 people worldwide competed; they recorded more than 441-thousand observations—nearly three and a half times the observations recorded last year.

The data can be brought to the city councils in cities to say: Look at the diversity of species in our area, and the people involved. A lot of people say that there‘s no nature in cities.

But the City Nature Challenge tosses that assumption on its ear. Find more results from this year’s challenge at citynaturechallenge.org.

For Texas Parks and Wildlife, I’m Cecilia Nasti

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 5th, 2018 at 12:00 am and is filed under City Nature Challenge, Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.