Get Wild About our Cities: Take the City Nature Challenge!

While Texas’s diverse landscape is host to 11 major ecoregions and over 1,300 Species of Greatest Conservation need, more than 85% of our population lives in a major metropolitan area – landscapes where rapid urbanization and habitat fragmentation threaten the sustainability of natural areas and resources. This presentation will focus on the City Nature Challenge, a global, city-scale BioBlitz event hosted on iNaturalist that frames an urban biodiversity survey as a friendly competition between cities. This event provides an excellent opportunity for engaging residents and visitors in and around Texas metropolitan areas to showcase and explore their biodiversity while contributing to nature stewardship through community science. We will review some of what we’ve learned, opportunities for local participation and engagement, and the value of the data generated to biodiversity conservation and resource management.

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