Join in and GET Green

GARDEN ROUTE NEWS - The Garden Route is counting down to a huge event - the City Nature Challenge from 24 April to 27 April.

During those four days, cities around the world will be competing to see who can make the most observations of nature, find the most species, and engage the most people in the 2020 City Nature Challenge.

To do well in this Citizen Science Bioblitz, high numbers of observations and species must be recorded. Last year, Cape Town beat 158 cities across the world.

GET, the Group Editors Together community platform, is promoting the challenge through the George Herald and its other local papers in the Garden Route and urging readers to join in and GET Green.

Sandra Falanga of Custodians of Rare and Endangered Wildflowers, better known as Crew Outramps, tells us how important and easy it is to place the Garden Route on the green map:

The Garden Route has received special permission to enter as a district and is up against some large cities with huge populations, such as Tokyo, San Francisco, Tshwane and Cape Town.

The Garden Route needs you to participate ....and your family, friends and anybody else you can persuade to join the fun!

It's easy: find wildlife, take a picture and share.

Candelabra lily

What's in it for you?

Satisfy your curiosity about what the plant, fish or anything you see, actually is.
Stand a chance of making an exciting discovery of a new plant or insect, or simply a new locality for that plant or animal.
Help make the Artificial Intelligence function of the app where the data is recorded, iNaturalist, better at identifying plants or animals in photographs by creating a bigger data base for comparison.

What's in it for the Garden Route?

A better data base for scientists and decision-makers to work with.
Displaying to the world just why we claim to be the Garden Route, not only for our scenery, but also for our huge biodiversity.
Many tourists travel to see a particular bird, dragonfly or plant in the wild. That means more tourists, which benefits the local economy.

Do it now!

Take up the challenge for the Garden Route yourself and start to practise now.

Sign up to iNaturalist here.

The information gathered has to be uploaded via the easy-to-use iNaturalist app, a social network where anyone can record the biodiversity of their area, access identification and expertise, and interact with like-minded individuals.

It is free and works on a smartphone app or computer.

You do not have to know what you observed, but will see how knowledgeable volunteers identify your observations.

Southern rock agama

In the following section, Christine Ridge-Schnaufer, honorary secretary of Wessa Eden, shares how she recently embarked on her City Nature Challenge journey:

How I got going
If you ever walk in the Garden Route Botanical Garden, you will probably have seen a man wearing a floppy hat bending over, zooming his camera onto something almost invisible to the casual walker.

That is Colin Ralston, who has been recording everything except the botany of the garden for the past several years.

He has found not only a huge variety of frogs, dragonflies and fungi, but has made some exceptional finds which created great interest in not only the South African scientific community, but also internationally. Scientists use iNaturalist as a source of recordings by citizen scientists - you and I - to establish population ranges and even density.

Having been inspired by what Colin does and having myself a modicum of curiosity about what our local natural environment has to offer, I just went and did it!

At home in the house I found a beautiful moth - the specious tiger - and in the pool a frog which hates water and used its defence mechanism of inflation to look bigger than it is to survive until I fished it out - the black rain frog. On the golf course I found Boletus mushrooms and bushbuck. At Sedgefield Market, beautiful candelabra lilies.

A drive over the Swartberg with visitors delivered gluey storkbill pelargonium, Southern rock agama, lichens, baboons, jackal buzzards and, the crowning glory, four Cape klipspringers. And all of of that in one week, without even trying!

And the great thing when posting the observations, the website offers similar photos to make identification easier. Then other iNatters fine-tune the observation.

So… JUST DO IT!

Lichen