The City Nature Challenge 2025 which will be held from April 25 to 28 is an attempt and an opportunity to develop closeness with nature and understand the biodiversity in our immediate surroundings
KALYANI JHA | NT BUZZ
City Nature Challenge, is an annual, global, citizen science initiative started in 2016 by Lila Higgins from the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and Alison Young and Rebecca Johnson from The California Academy of Sciences. Different cities from countries around the world compete in a healthy way to learn about and document the biodiversity.
After several attempts in previous years, this is the first time it is being conducted in Goa at this scale.
“The idea behind it is to get citizens interested in documenting biodiversity. WWF has been in Goa for almost 41 years and through our activities what we have noticed is that there is very less information on most of our biodiversity. This is because our naturalists tend to focus on only some of the glamorous fields. For instance, many tend to look at birds as it is easy to do so. But with the City Nature Challenge, we are trying to introduce people to all sorts of organisms,” shares state coordinator – Goa, WWF, Aditya Kakodkar.
Anyone from anywhere in Goa can participate in it. Over the four days, April 25 to 28, participants have to take pictures of various flora and fauna and upload these on the iNaturalist app, the globally used platform for
this competition.
If people have taken a lot of photographs but are not able to upload them in those four days, there is some grace period which is given up to first week of May, until which they can upload
the photographs.
“You don’t even need to identify the organism. For instance, if you are photographing a spider, you don’t need to know its scientific name or what spider it is; you can just label it as a spider or a butterfly. The picture will then go to the relevant experts on the platform, who will identify the organism,” he says.
Apart from helping people learn more about the biodiversity around them, documenting these is also away to acquire new data for further use of science. “When you take a photograph using the iNaturalist app, it automatically captures the latitude, longitude or the location of that organism. Thus, it helps in gives us a bigger picture, by telling us how rich a certain area is in biodiversity,” explains Kakodkar.
And the idea of making this into a challenge of sort, is to give a sense of playing, says Kakodkar. “It’s like gamifying the whole documentation of biodiversity. There is a leaderboard at the end, where the number of observations from that place are all calculated, and there is a score which is generated at the end,” he says. The score tells the position of your city in the global and the national context.
WWF has made provision for prizes worth Rs. 20,000 in different categories for the participants like highest number of species observed and highest number of total identification.
There are five categories for prizes: school students, upto class 12, college students, general citizens, senior citizens, and overall (includes all participants.) There is a special prize kept for senior citizens with the highest number of entries. Currently, trails and webinars are being conducted to educate the participants on identifying spiders, wasps, ants, mangroves, sand dune vegetation, organisms on the beaches, etc. Around 200 people have already come for the trails and registered for
the challenge.
People closely working on the City Nature Challenge from Goa includes Prasanna Parab, Dr. Ashish Prabhugaonkar, Dr. Sandesh Gawas, Dr. M.K. Janarthanam, Parag Rangnekar, Omkar Dharwadkar, Dr. Pronoy Baidya, Harshada Gawas, Benhail Antao, Arti Das, and Charan Desai.
