Cape Town will be participating in the iNatural City Nature Challenge from 26-29 April, where cities around the world compete to record the most observations of local wildlife (fauna) and plants (flora). Cape Town is one of the most biodiverse cities on Earth, so the challenge is on!
Communitree invites you to join us to map all the plants and animals at our priority sites. We require at least two volunteers at each site; one volunteer to map the plants and another to map the wildlife, but the more the merrier! By participating, not only will you will learn more about the nature in your city, but also provide us with an excellent baseline for monitoring the animal and plant species at our sites.
Everyone is encouraged to take part in this challenge. You can choose any day, between the 26th and 29th of April, to join in the fun. Simply download iNaturalist and sign up on our website, so we´ll know who is coming.
We will be hosting a training session, for those interested, to practice for the big event. These sessions will provide you with useful information on how to use iNaturalist, and handy photographic tips and tricks. Please indicate in the comment section, when signing up for the event, if you are interested in joining the training session.
About Monitoring activities
At Communitree we want to make sure that our work has a positive impact on the wider ecological functioning of the city's green infrastructure. That means that we want to go our and monitor our own work. We do this in different ways. One way is that we go out to our greening sites and we monitor the plants and the vegetation. We monitor for plant diseases, impact by the drought, damage to the plants, and other issues. If anything is wrong, our monitoring team will report this and our gardening volunteers will look into the matter. At the same time, we look for new plant growth, we try to observe the species that are present, and we see if everything is going according to the plan that we devised for the plot.
Another type of monitoring is related to the bird monitoring. By counting birds on our sites, we can get an idea of the ecological functioning of our plot. We are working together with the Iingcungcu sunbird project and the Cape Bird Club when it comes to training and bird monitoring, and we are excited to see what comes out of these efforts. To join bird monitoring work, you must have received some training, but we can always use an extra pair of eyes, in case you have not yet gone through the training.
