A group of Brandeis University students spent a recent Friday morning scouting flora and fauna on their campus.
They were among many volunteers in the Boston area and hundreds of cities worldwide who got outside over four days this month to document urban biodiversity with the City Nature Challenge. The collaborative competition encourages people to contribute scientific data — and get excited — about wildlife in cities.
With the sun peeking out behind lingering rain clouds, the Brandeis students made their way to a wooded area at the edge of campus. Bird calls filled the air as they trekked over damp leaves.
“ This is good, especially because it’s really moist today,” said senior Lily Lyons, the leader of the expedition and a teaching assistant. Lyons instructed the group to “go digging around.”
“We can go through the leaf litter, flip some logs — just make sure you flip them back over when you’re done,” she instructed the group.
It wasn’t long before senior Rose Nolan shouted with excitement. She had discovered a collection of crawling critters near a fallen log.
“ Look at the centipede, he’s stuck underneath the twig. He’s trying to walk and he’s slipping,” Nolan said.
There were laughs and some sounds of disgust. Some of her classmates ventured over, phones out, to snap a photo of the specimen.
The students used an app called iNaturalist to upload their photos, identify species and collaborate with other nature hunters in the area. The app also allowed them to compete with their classmates.
Some students said they use the app year-round. Freshman Thomas O’Connor Golden said he regularly “i-Nats” around campus. For the Nature Challenge outing, he brought Petri dishes and a camera with a special zoom lens to document insects.
“ This is what I like about using iNaturalist,” he said. “You find new organisms you’d never even heard of before, especially with insects. That’s my goal really, is just supplementing my learning in class while also doing something that feels productive.”
Another student in the group, Irina Robinson, is a first year and treasurer of the school’s Botany Club. She said the club wants to log all the trees on campus.
“ I think it’s just really important. Even if we’re taking pictures and like recording flowers or smaller species, just to get as much information as we can of Brandeis’s campus,” Robinson said.
This was the ninth year that Boston groups participated in the City Nature Challenge, which took place from April 25 to 28. Cities around the world compete with each other to log the most observations on iNaturalist, which researchers sometimes use for their work.
“ I’m always curious about piquing people’s interests in bio-literacy,” said Colleen Hitchcock, who teaches biology and ecology at Brandeis, and organized the campus effort. She’s also helped out with other similar Boston-area events.
Hitchcock said she hopes projects like this one teach people to look at green spaces and see “different species versus there’s just trees.”
Hitchcock invited students in her conservation biology class to bring friends for the challenge.
“ My hope, if [my students] bring a friend today, is that it’s kind of infectious and that they’re then showing other people how to access this library of nature,” she said.
While heading back to class from a nearby grassy field, Hitchcock declared this year’s challenge a success. The group identified over 200 species — double the goal they had set.
“Species have been seen, species have been heard,” Hitchcock said. “That to me sounds like success.”
This article was originally published on WBUR.org. It was shared as part of the New England News Collaborative.
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