The City Nature Challenge

This year, the Liverpool City Region is taking part in the 2019 City Nature Challenge, in which the city will compete against other cities, globally, in what has been described as the ‘premier league’ of wildlife recording.

City Nature Challenge is organised on a global scale by the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and the California Academy of Sciences.

Between the 26th and 29th April, over 150 cities worldwide will be competing to find urban and record wildlife. We will be pitting our wildlife spotting skills against the likes of Athens, LA, London and Manchester.

There are two ways to get involved with this fun and friendly competition. You can take part independently using the iNaturalist app to record any wildlife you spot over that weekend. You could record the ladybirds living on your balcony, the birds in the local park or the mushrooms you’ve seen on a walk in the countryside. The app is available to download at www.inaturalist.org

You can also get involved by joining us at one of the many recording events taking place that weekend in parks and greenspaces across the Liverpool city Region held by Liverpool’s amazing local and national conservation organisations.

On Friday the 26th April, Croxteth Park Volunteer Group will be kicking off the Challenge with a Wildlife Walk and Recording Session. On the same day, a Wildlife Recording Day will be taking place at Royden Park organised by RECORD at 10am. On Saturday 27th Heal Earth are hosting a Family Foraging Walk at the North Wirral Coastal Park. And on Sunday 28th to round off the weekend we will be hosting a Wildlife Bring and Share Picnic at Freshfield in Formby, recording wildlife at the Lunt Meadows, Seaforth Nature reserve and Freshfield Dune Heath.

Anyone is welcome to come along and have a go. More information on the recording events taking place that weekend can be found by heading to www.eventbrite.org and searching for 'Greenspace and Wildlife: LCR Year of the Environment’.

Anyone who joins in will be helping to make a difference, mapping where wildlife lives in the city. The information from this weekend will be added to the UK’s biodiversity database, becoming part of the data used to protect nature.

Ben Deed, Lead Environmental Records Officer for Merseyside Biobank said “The City Nature Challenge is a global competition where the Liverpool City Region will join together and go toe-to-toe with the rest of the world to showcase it’s incredible wildlife. We need your help to do this but It’s really easy to take part. Just download the iNaturalist App, get outdoors and upload photos of the wildlife you see. By taking part will help you to discover plants, animals and fungi that make our parks and greenspaces their home and the information you send in will be shared with a range of organisations to help improve our knowledge of wildlife across the region, promoting and protecting important places for wildlife and aiding conservation and scientific research..”

Records also help owners and organisations manage land for all species, and track how climate change, habitat management and other changes affect biodiversity over time – locally and nationally, as our records feed into the national NBN database.”