City Nature Challenge

Ivy Creek Natural Area is a site for this year’s City Nature Challenge in Charlottesville, which is being organized by The Nature Conservancy (TNC).

What is the City Nature Challenge?
The City Nature Challenge (CNC) is an international citizen science effort to discover and document plants and wildlife in cities across the globe. What began in 2016 as a friendly challenge between Los Angeles and San Francisco, organized by the California Academy of Sciences and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, has now grown to an international event.

Get Involved
It’s easy to get involved using the iNaturalist app (free on the app store). Just take a picture of a plant or animal and upload it to the app. Any observations made in the Charlottesville challenge area will count during the event.

Explore your neighborhood parks—or even your own backyard. There’s nature all around you!

After the challenge, TNC will need help identifying the observations recorded in iNaturalist. The more observations they get down to species level, the more species our area gets in our tally! It also provides valuable data for scientists, land managers, non-profits, and governments about the areas that they help to protect.

For more information, visit TNC's website at: www.nature.org/en-us/about-us/where-we-work/united-states/virginia/.