Love nature? Curious about the biodiversity around you?

What is the City Nature Challenge?

The City Nature Challenge (CNC) is an annual international event to collaboratively record as many wildlife observations as possible during a four day challenge. It is run by the Community Science teams at the California Academy of Sciences and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. People from all over the world explore nature in their neighborhoods and cities to find and document wildlife. Every year, we record how many observations of nature are gathered, how many different species are documented, and how many people help this global scientific community better understand nature all over the world. With this data we can better protect urban nature globally. CNC 2025 takes place in two phases: the Observation Phase from April 25–28, and the Identification Phase for uploading and identifying observations, continuing until May 4. 

Goals of the CNC

• Connect people in urban/metro areas to their urban biodiversity 

• Connect people to each other: build community in person and online around local nature. 

• Collect biodiversity data available to use for science management, and conservation. 

• Grow volunteer biodiversity documentation globally 

• Have fun through some friendly competition and global collaboration

What is Citizen Science? 

Citizen science is the practice of public participation and collaboration in scientific research to increase scientific knowledge. Through citizen science, people share and contribute to data monitoring and collection programs.

Partner with us! 

If you are a part of a city/regional government, science/nature center, school, university, nature group or NGO working in nature conservation, you can help spread the word, organise local events, and help us build a community for the City Nature Challenge 2025. CNC works where cities are in a collaboration-meets-friendly-competition to see not only what can be accomplished when we all work towards a common goal, but also which city can gather the most observations in nature, find the most species, and engage the most people in the event.

Be a part of it to:

• Associate your brand with what matters most in conservation - connecting people with nature

• Build both formal/informal community for future events

• Build international brand recognition and credentials

• Initiate thought leadership - put your city on the global biodiversity map

• Engage your volunteers and stakeholders in a gamified high energy global event

Write to us at citynaturechallengeindia@gmail.com

The iNaturalist App on which the CNC is run, is a social network of naturalists, citizen scientists, and biologists built on the concept of mapping and sharing observations of biodiversity across the globe. iNaturalist users have contributed approximately 115,651,000 observations of plants, animals, fungi, and other organisms worldwide.