Philadelphia City Nature Challenge 2024:

Help Philly compete in this Global Project to see who can find the most species in our region! The 2024 City Nature Challenge is held April 26th and April 29th (Friday-Monday). On any or all of these days, go out and take a picture of any wild organism in Philadelphia or the 6 adjacent counties and upload it to iNaturalist.

Document the plants, animals, and fungi in Philadelphia, Delaware, Montgomery, and Bucks counties in PA and Camden, Gloucester, and Burlington counties in NJ…competing against other cities in the world to see who can find the most species in their regions.
How to Participate
Want to participate in the City Nature Challenge? It’s simple, here’s how:

Go outside and find wildlife
Take photos
Upload your observations to iNaturalist

If you prefer more detailed instructions, here they are:
Before the challenge:
Download the iNaturalist app for Android or iOS
Create an account on iNaturalist
(Optional) Create an account on SciStarter. Go to your SciStarter profile->Info & Settings-> scroll down to “Integrations and add your INaturalist user name then click Save. Your participation in the Philly City Nature Challenge will count towards a collective goal of One Million Acts of Science this Citizen Science Month!
During the challenge:

Go out – You can go to one of our scheduled events or go exploring on your own. You can even hang out in your own backyard.
Find any wild thing – Plant, mammal, bird, insect, fungi, fish, or even evidence of living organisms like tracks, shells or scat. A tree gnawed by a beaver can even count as 2 observations! One for the tree and another for the beaver (even if you didn’t actually see the beaver).
Make a recording of it – Pictures are preferred, but we can take audio recordings too (video recordings are currently not supported, but you can convert them into small gifs first using something like the ezgif website and then upload the gif).
Note your location – Either manually or you can set up your phone as well as many modern cameras to automatically record the GPS coordinates of our photos.
Upload your observations – Add your observations to iNaturalist. You don’t need to manually add your observations to the project; the project will automatically aggregate any observations made in the designated area. You can upload observations using the iNaturalist app in the field or from your computer using the iNaturalist website. Check out our resources section for help with this.

After the challenge:
Identify – Help identify other people’s observations. This will help boost our species totals.
Be sure to follow us on social media.