City Nature Challenge 2025: 4 days to capture the amazing wild world around you!

Celebrating its 10th anniversary, the City Nature Challenge (CNC) began in 2016 as a competition between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Now this international event challenges people to find and document nature in their own cities. Run by the Community Science teams at the California Academy of Sciences and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (NHM), the CNC is an annual four-day global bioblitz at the end of April, where cities are in a collaboration-meets-friendly-competition to see what can be accomplished when we all work toward a common goal.

Orange County, CA is a participating ‘city’ this year (City Nature Challenge 2025: Orange County project page). Organized on iNaturalist by the Santa Ana Zoo and Santiago Creek ECO Center, all observations within OC will count. This event runs from April 25th to April 28th, 2025.

♦What is iNaturalist?

iNaturalist is a digital platform where people record and organize observations of the natural world. You can learn about nature and collaborate with other nature curious people as well.  Today, it is one of the largest community-based science, or citizen science, networking hub online.

♦How do I participate?

First, create a free iNaturalist account (www.inaturalist.org). They also suggest you download their app (Google Play or App Store). You may use the Seek app (Seek is run by iNaturalist), but make sure you log in with your iNaturalist account.

Second, take photos of plants, animals, or other evidence of life. Then upload and share your observations to iNaturalist and voila! That’s it!  Feel free to join the City Nature Challenge 2025: Orange County project, but it’s not a requirement for your observations to count toward the total.  Also remember, observations taken between April 25th and 28th, 2025 to count!

Join us (@bolsasteward) on iNaturalist!  We will be recording what we find at the Bolsa Chica Wetlands!

Learn more about the City Nature Challenge at www.citynaturechallenge.org. Visit this useful FAQ page to answer other questions about CNC.