Annual City Nature Challenge 25 to 28 April 2025

Hi FODS members,

Remember that we took part in this challenge last year as a FODS group. While we were a small group, we logged a significant number of species in just a small section of the spruit.

Here below is the first notice of the 2025 challenge:

Dear Leaders of Friends Groups,

It is almost time for the annual City Nature Challenge. This is a worldwide challenge to document the biodiversity of our cities – and regions in some cases – using the iNaturalist app on a smartphone.

I hope you will all be taking part and encouraging as many people as possible to do so too! With all the rain we have had, there is a lot of interesting vegetation and it seems to me there are also many more insects to be seen than usual (maybe the lack of mowing had something to do with the abundance of insects, especially butterflies).

If you can organise a bio blitz in your nature area on one of the days of the challenge, so much the better – but encourage people to capture our biodiversity on all of the four days of the challenge.

The challenge takes place in two parts:

25 to 28 April 2025 – taking pictures of plants, animals, insects, birds, fungi

29 April to 4 May 2025 – identifying what was found – if you can help with this it will be much appreciated!

5 May 2025 – results announced.

Here are some helpful links to sites where you can track the progress of all the participants in each city:

 Tshwane Project:  https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/city-nature-challenge-2025-tshwane

Please mark the dates above in your calendars now and let’s see if we can set a new record for the number of people taking part and the number of species logged. We’ll send further updates closer to the time bt, in the meantime, please check that you have the iNaturalist App downloaded on your phone.

Regards

Charles Costello
+27 82 653 9430