City Nature Challenge: For Plant-lovers and Botanists Alike!

In this Torrey Talk, two iNaturalist experts will show how you can participate in iNaturalist and this year’s upcoming City Nature Challenge. Unlike most other citizen science platforms, iNaturalist allows anyone to record their observations of any living thing anywhere in the world. The City Nature Challenge, based on iNaturalist, engages community members in cities and urbanized areas around the world to make observations, and provides opportunities for taxonomic experts to identify them, all over the world. Last year over 400 cities participated, with over 50,000 people documenting over 45,000 species with over 1.2 million observations, the largest bioblitz in the world.

About the Speakers:
Chris Kreussling is an urban naturalist and advocate for urban habitat gardening with native plants. His Brooklyn garden contains over 200 NYC-native plant species, and hosts over 400 insect species, all recorded on iNaturalist, and documented on his blog, Flatbush Gardener (http://flatbushgardener.blogspot.com/). He has led numerous native plant and pollinator walks and workshops, for NYC Wildflower Week, Wave Hill, the High Line, and others. He’s an avid user of iNaturalist, and has acted as Brooklyn Borough Captain for NYC’s City Nature Challenge since 2019. He has served as Torrey’s Corresponding Secretary since 2017, and is active with the NYC Pollinator Working Group (https://nycpollinators.org/).

Zihao Wang is a botanist whose focus is on the rare plant species in the New York metropolitan area. He has collaborated with The New York Botanical Garden, New York Natural Heritage Program, and NYC Parks in documenting occurrences of rare plants and nonnative plants.
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presented by Chris Kreussling and Zihao Wang
Torrey Botanical Society Spring 2022 Lecture Series
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00:00 iNaturalist for Science, Zihao Wang
5:08 Open Science Platform Integration with iNaturalist, Chris Kreussling
12:20 iNat-GloBI integration
14:40 Making Good Plant Observations, Zihao Wang
28:21 City Nature Challenge
38:23 Closing Remarks
39:47 Q&A
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For more information on future lectures, field trips, and the Torrey Botanical Society, visit https://www.torreybotanical.org