The City Nature Challenge - A global citizen science phenomenon contributing to biodiversity knowledge and informing local government practices

Abstract

The bioblitz phenomenon has recently branched into cities, presenting exciting opportunities for local governments to channel participants efforts toward local issues. The City Nature Challenge (CNC) is one such initiative that has been quickly uptaken by hundreds of municipalities worldwide. Despite high participation, we still lack a framework for evaluating how the CNC contributes to local biodiversity knowledge and to inform local government practices. Here, we develop such a tool and present a case study that illustrates its applicability. We demonstrate that the collected records contributed to a better understanding of contemporary, local biodiversity patterns and provided a more realistic representation of understudied groups such as insects and fungi. Importantly, we show that the CNC presented local governments with a cost-effective tool to make informed, evidence-based management and policy decisions, improve education and engagement programs, foster cross-council collaborations, and support a stronger sense of environmental stewardship within the local community.