Outdoor enthusiasts, environmentalists and photographers delight in the wealth of flora and fauna to be found in Mazatlán. Now we have a terrific chance to let the world know about the incredible biodiversity of our urban area—we are much more than just sun and beach!

Francisco Farriols Sarabia, local naturalist guru, along with our Faculty of Marine Sciences have registered Mazatlán for the City Nature Challenge 2019, or Reto Mundial de la Naturaleza Urbana. The effort is officially supported by the Secretary of Tourism (SECTUR) and the National Commission on Biodiversity (CONABIO). The goal is to put us firmly on the international ecotourism map. I hope that you, your friends and family will join in as citizen ecologists! If you are a teacher, let’s get the students involved, too! There is a nice online education toolkit. Let’s do this! Let’s put Mazatlán on the map for good reason!

The challenge will take place April 26-29, 2019, and there will be several pre-event warm-ups or “BioBlitzes.” To participate you’ll need your cell phone or a camera and the iNaturalist app—you can install it on your phone and/or register and use via your desktop on a web browser. If you prefer to work in Spanish, the fully synched Mexican equivalent is Naturalista.mx.

City Nature Challenge is an initiative started in 2016 as a friendly competition between Los Angeles and San Francisco during Citizen Science Day. The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and the California Academy of Sciences wanted to highlight urban biodiversity in their cities, and asked residents and tourists alike to help them document it. The multi-day effort met with such success that, three years later, over 100 cities worldwide are registered to participate! Their website states that in 2016:

Over 20,000 observations were made by more than 1000 people in a one-week period, cataloging approximately 1600 species in each location, including new records for both areas. During the 2016 CNC, we heard so much excitement and interest from people in other cities that we decided we couldn’t keep to the fun just to ourselves. In 2017 the City Nature Challenge went national, and in 2018, the CNC became an international event!

I first learned about City Nature Challenge back on October 13th, when Paco (Francisco) held a meeting of local photographers up at Estero del Yugo, to help get the effort started. Since then Paco has decided to hold mini-challenges, to help more people become involved and ready for the big effort.

The second BioBlitz or mini-challenge will be held at the lighthouse beginning 8-11am on Saturday January 12th. Register with inaturalist.org and bring your cell phone or camera of your choice. Together we’ll have fun, get out, breathe some fresh air and get some exercise, and learn a bit more about our local flora and fauna. It’ll be a great way to get trained and prepared for the main challenge in April!

iNaturalist.org is a really cool platform where normal people like you and me can register photos we take of plants, animals, insects or marine life. We upload a photo we’ve taken, along with the place and the date on which we captured the pic. If you know what the plant or animal is, you label it. If not, somebody who does know will fill it in for you, and you can “accept” their ideas and recommendations, or choose which one is correct. In this way we all learn a bit, and scientists are able to track migration routes and the proliferation of different species. Paco himself has more than 35,000 identifications and 2200 species registered! Me? I have about ten…

I hope you’ll join me, both on the January 12th and in April for the main event! Please help me get the word out by sharing this and inviting your friends and family to join in! Together we can build more ecological awareness and care in our fair city.