iNaturalist City Nature Challenge: my Skukuza Edition
Some of the observations seen in the Skukuza village in Kruger by intern, Esi Bossman during the iNaturalist City Challenge.
iNaturalist began as a Master’s project at UC Berkeley’s School of Information in 2008. It is a citizen science biodiversity platform that connects naturalists to researchers and other naturalists from around the world. It allows people from all walks of life to contribute directly to science by taking pictures of fauna and flora around them and uploading these observations for identification and use in various research projects (publications produced from iNaturalist observations: https://www.citynaturechallenge.org).
The iNaturalist City Nature Challenge is a global BioBlitz, being one of the largest community science events in the world! The challenge requires people to make observations over a four-day period and compete with other naturalists, in their own cities or globally, by flooding the platform with new observations. In 2023, I competed from Skukuza, Mpumalanga (between 28 April and 1 May). Unfortunately, Skukuza is not a registered city on iNaturalist, as it is only a village within the Kruger National Park. Therefore, I decided to compete globally!
Roughly 31 000 steps later, I reached 158 incredible observations from within the staff village! Globally, there were 1 870 763 observations, over 57 227 species and 66 394 participants from over 350 cities in this year’s challenge (https://www.citynaturechallenge.org/past-results).
I encourage others from around the world to participate with me again next year, for some friendly competition! Stay curious and happy observing!
This article was written by Esi Bossman and originally published in the 2022/2023 Research Report.
