Join our iNaturalist Team: Northern Ohio Team for the 2026 City Nature Challenge.
Our region will once again participate in the City Nature Challenge. The observation period is from April 24-27, 2026. And the identification process will take place from April 28 - May 10, 2026. Final results will be announced on Monday May 13, 2026.
What is City Nature Challenge?
Started in 2016 for the first-ever Citizen Science Day, the community science teams at NHM and California Academy of Sciences dreamed up the City Nature Challenge as a fun way to capitalize on their home cities’ friendly rivalry and hold an event around urban biodiversity. The first City Nature Challenge was an eight-day competition between Los Angeles and San Francisco, engaging residents and visitors in documenting nature to better understand urban biodiversity.
In its first year, over 20,000 observations were made by more than 1,000 people in a one-week period, cataloging approximately 1,600 species in each location, including new records for both areas. During the 2016 CNC, there was so much excitement and interest from people in other cities that the organizers knew they couldn’t keep the fun just to themselves. In 2017 the City Nature Challenge went national, and in 2018, the CNC became an international event!