Biodiversity loss is one of the most urgent environmental issues around the globe today. Nations and communities worldwide face the challenge of keeping accurate and consistently up-to-date records of wildlife.
Meanwhile, nature — both plants and animals — are all around us, even in our cities. Knowing what species exist in cities and where they are helps efforts to conserve and protect them. But the way to do so is by finding and documenting nature in urban areas.
This realisation led to the launch of the City Nature Challenge (CNC), an international effort initiated by the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles and California Academy of Sciences for people to find and document plants and wildlife in cities across the globe.
The first City Nature Challenge was held in 2016 — an eight-day competition in Los Angeles that engaged residents and visitors to document nature to better understand urban biodiversity. Over 20,000 observations were made by more than 1,000 people in a one-week period, cataloging approximately 1,600 species in each location, including new records for both areas.
Last year, the City Nature Challenge then went national in the United States.
City Nature Challenge 2018 went international, carried out from April 27 to 30. Almost 70 cities around the world, all mobilising their residents and visitors to go out and find and document nature.
The Klang Valley was the first Malaysian and Southeast Asian urban metro area to participate in the City Nature Challenge. Co-organised by the Rimba Project, with Water Warriors of Universiti Malaya (UM), the Klang Valley City Nature Challenge (KVCNC) aimed to reconnect urban communities with nature, and advocate for urban wildlife and biodiversity conservation.
To enter the challenge, participants had to download an app, snap a photo of flora or fauna and post it on a specified website. There were three types of participants: observers, species finders and identifiers.
Observers were those who have contributed images or records of flora or fauna. Species-finders were those who were able to find different types of species, while identifiers could identify or name observations made by not only themselves but also others.
According to KVCNC coordinator Benjamin Ong, the event mobilised not only the scientific communities and nature enthusiasts, but also community groups and the public, all working together to discover and document the city’s wildlife.
A total of 685 Malaysians participated. At least 300 of these were school students, with final numbers being finalised with schoolteachers. The event spanned the entire Klang Valley, defined as the sum of 10 municipalities: Kuala Lumpur, Petaling Jaya, Shah Alam, Subang Jaya, Klang, Sepang, Putrajaya, Ampang, Selayang and Kajang.
“For the observations category, we finished 4th in the world out of nearly 70 cities. We are also the city that added the most new species to our region on iNaturalist through the City Nature Challenge,” said Ong. iNaturalist is a citizen science project and online social network of naturalists, citizen scientists, and biologists built on the concept of mapping and sharing
“We added 1,392 new species for our region (Klang Valley) to the online iNaturalist database. This does not mean we discovered any new species, it’s just that these species, for the Klang Valley, were not recorded on this particular online databases.
“The implications are less interesting in terms of science — meaning these are not new species, and strictly speaking there is no scientific ‘breakthrough’, but it is far more interesting in terms of public engagement. That we actually managed to get people interested to document such a wide array of species is an achievement,” he said.
Four Malaysians are among the world’s Top 5 observers at City Nature Challenge 2018. The top observer was Tan Kai Ren, a third year undergraduate in Ecology and Biodiversity at UM. Second place went to Thary Gazi, a PhD candidate and entomologist at UM, while 4th place went to Affan Nasaruddin, founder and project officer of Water Warriors, a UM Living Lab. Ong took fifth place.
As for KVCNC, Ong regarded it as a success.
“A biodiversity/conservation event of this scale has never been held in the Klang Valley, maybe even in Malaysia. The fact that we got the ball rolling is already a success, to say nothing of our achievements.”
For the next CNC, he said the co-organisers would like to boost school participation.
“We would like to reach out to more schools and provide more pre-event training. This can also be a great avenue to integrate outdoor learning with the formal classroom syllabus.
“We would also like to strengthen the network of scientific advisers for the event. What we lacked this year was the capacity to identify the species that were being observed. Not many scientists or experts have joined the movement. We would like to reach out to more people in an ‘advisory’ capacity, whether they are professional scientists or advanced amateurs/enthusiasts. In the West, there are huge communities of nature lovers that are often just as competent as scientists, and these people offer their expertise in events like the CNC,” he said.
Ong said this year, the Rimba Project and its UM colleagues were the main event drivers.
“But the Klang Valley is a huge place with a massive population. We can do so much more if we had local ‘chapters’ that would handle the event within the municipality. It would make publicity and coordination a lot easier,” he said.