About The City Nature Challenge
It is a community effort!
The Louisiana Master Naturalists of Greater Baton Rouge organization is spearheading the local effort in the Baton Rouge area. LMNGBR is a non-profit volunteer organization dedicated to conservation education and service in the Greater Baton Rouge community.
2021 was the first year that Baton Rouge participated in the CNC.
Please help out by spreading the word about this event!
Local Partners
The City Nature Challenge is a community collaboration, and the following organizations are contributing by making observations and supporting the fun, science, outreach, and education of exploring nature:
If your organization would like to be a partner and/or lead a public or private event as part of this effort, please join in! Please contact brnaturechallenge@gmail.com.
The Global Organizers
The City Nature Challenge is organized by the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and the California Academy of Sciences.
It all started…
… in 2016 for the first-ever Citizen Science Day, the citizen science teams at Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and California Academy of Sciences dreamed up the City Nature Challenge as a fun way to capitalize on their home cities’ friendly rivalry and hold a citizen science event around urban biodiversity. The first City Nature Challenge was an eight-day competition between Los Angeles and San Francisco, engaging residents and visitors in documenting nature to better understand urban biodiversity. 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, there was so much excitement and interest from people in other cities that they decided that they couldn’t keep to the fun just to themselves. In 2017, the City Nature Challenge went national, and in 2018, the CNC became an international event! In 2021, the CNC surpassed 1 million observations in one weekend!