EnglishBy Jason G. Goldman
When Lila Higgins first had the idea to pit Los Angeles against San Francisco in a race to see which city could generate the most biodiversity data in just eight days, she had no idea it would spawn a global movement.
The year was 2016, and the Obama White House had declared April 16 of that year as “Citizen Science Day.” Higgins, the Senior Director of Community Science at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, and Allison Young, her counterpart at the California Academy of Sciences, wanted to find a way to celebrate. With the support of their respective museums, they worked together to engage residents and visitors in both cities to document urban biodiversity. That year, more than 1000 people recorded more than 20,000 observations of urban wildlife, cataloging some 3200 species altogether. (And Los Angeles won!)
In 2017, the competition became national and was officially called the “City Nature Challenge.” In 2018, it went global, with participation from sixty-eight cities. But it wasn’t until 2020, during the coronavirus pandemic, that participation happened in Nicaragua.
That year, the challenge was framed more as collaboration than competition. “We had to do something that would keep people safe but also acknowledge the power of nature for healing; we all needed healing,” Higgins recalls. In all, the challenge generated more than 815,000 observations from more people than ever: over 41,000. In Nicaragua’s capital city of Managua, 42 people contributed 901 observations of 430 species.
The numbers for the 2021 haven’t been tallied yet, but Higgins says that four cities from Nicaragua participated this year. Paso Pacífico wildlife biologist Osmar Sandino helped organize the challenge in the small Pacific beach town of Ostional, south of San Juan del Sur. This town is famous for the arribada, the annual mass arrival of olive ridley sea turtles to reproduce and lay their eggs – but there’s a lot more biodiversity in this small town than just sea turtles.
A mantled howler monkey mother and baby, seen on the day of the City Nature Challenge. Photo by Oswaldo Saballos.
In all, participants in the Ostional area, including children from Paso Pacífico’s Junior Rangers program, recorded 141 species there. They included howler monkeys, Inca doves, Central American boa constrictors, striped hog-nosed skunks, northern jacanas, cattle egrets, ferruginous pygmy-owls, giant toads, laughing gulls, golden silk spiders, spiny-tailed iguanas, and, of course, olive ridley sea turtles.
Each observation consists of a photo taken with a smartphone and uploaded to an app called iNaturalist. Because the photos are taken with phones, they automatically come with a timestamp and a geolocation, with latitude and longitude. Data about the person taking the photos can be made private. Once the species identification is confirmed, the data becomes available to researchers of wildlife biology, ecology, or natural history. Taken together, the millions of observations uploaded each year for the City Nature Challenge probably represents one of the largest biodiversity datasets in the history of science. Even without access to the plants and animals themselves, researchers have a historical record of when and where different species occur on the planet. That allows scientists to investigate a huge variety of questions, including tracking the introduction of non-native species into new ecosystems or the movement of species in response to climate change or other anthropogenic impacts.
And because most animals and plants are found on private property, rather than public lands, these records become even more useful to researchers, who would in most cases be completely prevented from making those observations themselves.
That’s the real power of citizen science, also known as community science. Not only does it involve non-experts in the scientific process, it also generates a wealth of information that scientists themselves could never produce on their own.
Paso Pacífico biologists Osmar Sandino, Marlon Sotelo and Oswaldo Saballos were among the Paso Pacífico personnel that participated in the 2021 City Nature Challenge. Photo by Osmar Sandino.