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City Nature Challenge from Interior's lands and waters

Jacob Malcom

• 3 min read
City Nature Challenge from Interior's lands and waters
Interior's lands and waters, like Valles Caldera National Preserve in New Mexico, are home for thousands of rare and common plants and animals...a great place to go for City Nature Challenge!

This time last year, I was out in the American Southwest with family and friends, engaged in competition. We were finding plants and critters from the valley bottom along the Rio Grande to spruce-pine forests over 10,000' in elevation. The lands and waters of the Department of the Interior delivered amazing diversity, such as this cute chipmunk from up in Valles Caldera National Preserve:

Least Chipmunk (Neotamias minimus)
Least Chipmunk from Sandoval County, US-NM, US on April 28, 2024 at 01:33 PM by Jacob Malcom
iNaturalist

Today, 25 April, is the kickoff of the 2025 City Nature Challenge, this year's version of that competition we were doing last year. If you haven't heard of it before, CNC is a four-day annual "competition" between people in cities and surrounding areas to find as many species of plants and animals as they can. I'm not alone in this– tens of thousands of people participate every year! It's a fantastic way to engage with nature and with others who enjoy nature, all while your observations contribute to a citizen science dataset that is used for research and conservation around the world.

And you know who provides excellent opportunities to find nature in CNC? The Department of the Interior!

One of the great things about nature and the CNC is that you don't have to go far to enjoy it! This year we'll be exploring our "backyard" in the mid-Atlantic around the Washington DC area, with the goal of visiting parks like Shenandoah and the C&O Canal, hopefully some refuges like Blackwater. What will we find? Could be a ton! The federal lands in the DC area (no, it's not just Interior, but a lot is...) harbor over 9,000 species!

Federal Lands of the Washington DC Metro Area
Let's use iNaturalist to show the love we have for public lands and biodiversity they support! Federal lands in the DC metropolitan area include expansive rural areas, neighborhood pocket parks in downtown Washington DC, and everything in between. They provide escape, solitude, rest, or a spot to sit on a bench and have lunch for the American people and visitors alike. They clean our air, filter our water and provide a home for the plants and animals that are our companions on this planet.
iNaturalist

We hope you get out - no matter where you are! - during City Nature Challenge 2025. Be sure to see what Interior lands are available nearby (like refuges, parks, BLM), visit them, and document some of our natural heritage!

Whether it's this weekend or another time, think about what you would like to see for the future of those lands and the plants and animals that call them home! If we lose these public lands, or the places and ecosystems that nature depends on, we'll surely be worse off.