Photo by Austin Tate on Unsplash
Let’s show off how amazing our cities can be for wildlife this spring!
City Nature Challenge is an annual four-day global 'bioblitz' nature hunt, to assist in recording and protecting wildlife in urban areas. Every year, cities all over the world take part in friendly and fun competition to see who can gather the most observations of nature and find the most species.
Discover wildlife in your local area and help scientists understand more about urban nature.
Type of activity: Outdoors
Who can take part? Everyone
When? Friday 25 - Monday 28 April 2025
Where? Towns and cities around the UK, and around the world!
How long will it take? About two minutes per observation
Cost: Free
In City Nature Challenge 2024, over 2.4 million observations were made of over 65,000 species with over 83,000 people taking part across the world - an astonishing collective effort that we can eclipse in 2025 with your support.
For 2025, individuals, families, and community groups in over 400 cities globally are invited to look for nature in their gardens, parks, public spaces or homes and join this worldwide effort to record as much wildlife as possible between 25 - 28 April 2025.
All you need is a smartphone and the iNaturalist mobile app. Share a photo with the app and it will assist you to identify and record the species you find. Each species record is known as an observation, and all observations made during the event in participating areas will count towards City Nature Challenge.
You can then joinother nature enthusiasts to work together to formally identify the records before they are shared for inclusion in local and national wildlife databases, which support nature conservation efforts.
All you need to get started is a smartphone with the FREE iNaturalist app downloaded, or a camera to take photos of what you see and upload to their website later. Bristol Natural History Consortium have prepared a simple guide to using iNaturalist (PDF 464KB).
The worldwide competition results will be revealed at www.citynaturechallenge.org on Monday 5 May 2025.
Organisations across London will be running events as part of City Nature Challenge 2025.
You can check out London's progress during the Challenge on the iNaturalist London project board.
To kick off 2025’s Challenge, our staff will be hosting a bioblitz in our gardens on the 25 of April between 11.00 and 14.00.
Based in and around the Nature Discovery Garden, we will be exploring the habitats in the gardens as well as the plants and animals that live there.
Visitors are invited to come and share the wonder of our urban gardens and use microscopes, hand lenses and pond dipping equipment to identify and record as much as possible.
If you are interested in organising an event in 2025, please email Jessica Wardlaw (j.wardlaw@nhm.ac.uk) or Ben Town (ben.town@nhm.ac.uk) for more information and resources.
Thank you to everyone that took part in City Nature Challenge 2024. In London over 560 community scientists recorded a grand total of 8,012 observations of 1,248 species.
You can read about the worldwide results on the City Nature Challenge website.
Cities and regions across the whole UK have signed up to take part in the Challenge. Check out the City Nature Challenge map to find out which cities are participating. During the event, you’ll be able to watch live results from UK cities involved and see which city has recorded the highest number of species and number of people taking part.
Your city or region isn’t competing this year? No problem! Any iNaturalist wildlife sightings during the event will still count towards the UK records and help fill in the map of where nature is living in your region. Or you can join the iNaturalist global project.
We encourage schools to take part. The City Nature Challenge organising team has produced some resources to support teachers and educators.
The information collected will create a valuable snapshot of the variety of wildlife that lives in cities. Knowing what species live in cities, and where they are, helps us to study and protect them. Documenting nature on a city-wide scale allows us not only to learn about the variety of nature in cities, but also about the sustainability of valuable ecosystems that thrive in cities.
With the world's wildlife facing unprecedented declines, and as urban areas expand, it has never been more important to make our towns and cities healthy and sustainable places to live side-by-side with nature. The only way to do that is for people to team up - including you!
City Nature Challenge is organised globally by California Academy of Sciences and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.
The Museum’s Community Science team is leading organisations around London participating in City Nature Challenge.
We thank our partners:
