Found in your backyard
The first Klang Valley City Nature Challenge identified lots of urban flora and fauna while also showcasing the public’s enthusiastic support for nature.
Amidst the concrete jungles of today’s cities, there is a surprising number of unique plants and animals that we don’t see while running the rat race. The City Nature Challenge aims to change that with the help of citizen scientists.
FOUR Malaysians emerged among the top five observers in the world, with the number one position claimed by an undergraduate from Universiti Malaya (UM).
This all happened late last month during the global City Nature Challenge (CNC) that took place simultaneously in 68 cities worldwide, including Kuala Lumpur. Results came out earlier this month.
The CNC is a bioblitz-style, mobile appbased competition in which cities see which can gather the most observations of nature, find the most species, and which can engage the most people.
In Malaysia, two environment projects based on UM grounds, the Rimba Project and Water Warriors, co-organised the first Klang Valley City Nature Challenge (KV CNC).
(The Rimba Project is an education and outreach programme in urban ecology and conservation based at UM’s Rimba Ilmu Botanic Garden; Water Warriors is a project that protects and conserves water bodies on the UM campus.)
The Klang Valley is the first Malaysian and first South-East Asian urban area to participate in the challenge. The KV CNC saw observations made in and around the Klang Valley that will help to establish a publicly accessible biodiversity baseline.
Overall, 25,287 observations were made of 1,775 species – including protozoans, fungi, plants, insects and animals – by 682 observers and 284 identifiers.
In the total observations made category, Klang Valley finished fourth among all the cities.
The top observer spot in the entire competition went to Tan Kai Ren, a third-year undergraduate in Ecology and Biodiversity at UM with 4,872 observations. (See Coming out tops, top right.)
Klang Valley also added the most new species from its environs onto the i Naturalist database, at 1,392.
However, this does not mean the discovery of new species, just that the species are new to the database.
This means the event’s scientific impact isn’t so significant; what is far more interesting, though, is its public engagement, says Benjamin Ong, Rimba Project founder.
“We actually managed to get enough people interested in documenting such a wide array of species – the educational potential of this achievement is huge.
“I think this is a very solid start for citizen science in urban biodiversity conservation. Prior to this, there have been citizen science efforts focused on specific groups of plants and animals (eg, trees, butterflies and birds), or on particular habitats like forest reserves.
“To the best of our knowledge, this is the first Malaysian bioblitz of this scale across the entire Klang Valley where we had observations from Klang to Gombak to Putrajaya, and across all taxa (groups) of plants and animals.
“In particular, we wanted to make the case that biodiversity is all around us, even in the city, and we are very happy that many of the observations made were literally in people’s backyards, schools, workplaces and residential neighbourhoods,” says Ong.
Nonetheless, he says there is still room for improvement.
“Although we made over 25,000 observations, we only managed to identify around 1,700 species. Also, we only had 279 identifiers (versus nearly 700 participants). This means that, at most, only a third of the partic--
ipants were able to identify what they observed.
“Therefore, moving forward, we intend to help people gain confidence in identifying some of the common plant and animal species in the city. We also intend to build networks that involve professional scientists as well as amateur naturalists to assist in this capacity building.
“Saying that there’s ‘plenty of data to sort, including many observations we have yet to identify!,’” Ong adds that the plan is to organise the data into a repository that can be easily accessed by the general public, and that can be used for nature and environmental education.
Overall, the 68 cities involved in the City Nature Challenge made a total of 441,888 observations, with 17,329 people taking part.
This year, the San Francisco Bay Area won all three categories of most observations (41,737), most species found (3,211), and most participants (1,532).
The event also made 4,075 research-grade observations of 599 rare, endangered and threatened species globally, and added over 100 new species that had not previously been recorded on the iNaturalist database before.
The first CNC was held in 2016 and was organised by the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and California Academy of Sciences in the United States. That year, it was an eight-day competition between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Over 20,000 observations were made by more than 1,000 people in a one-week period, cataloguing approximately 1,600 species in each location.
In 2017, the CNC spread across the United States, and this year, it was held as an international event with nature-related organisations in cities across the globe organising the event in their local areas.
For more information on the City Nature Challenge and how to participate in next year’s challenge, go to citynaturechallenge.org.