City Nature Challenge

To celebrate Earth Day, Silver City Watershed Keepers organizes a City Nature Challenge (CNC) in Silver City and the broader Grant County area. The CNC happens annually, with community scientists around the world working to record as many species as possible during a four day span.

Why participate? It's critical for our community to know the wildlife that also call our watershed home. This event emphasizes the role that towns and cities play in affecting biodiversity and invites people of all ages and abilities to explore nature in their backyards, city parks, and beyond.

Observations made during the CNC will be publicly available on the iNaturalist database (inaturalist.org) and app. These observations can be viewed by those in our community, then used in schools for biology lessons, by local governments and conservation organizations to monitor invasive species or ecosystem health, and by scientists to define species’ ranges, migration corridors, and inter-relationships.

How can Bird Alliance members get involved? We encourage folks to take photos or audio recordings of birds to post to iNaturalist during the City Nature Challenge. Those who know the birds in our region can add identifications to photos and audio recordings in the week following the CNC.