PHILADELPHIA - This weekend, some local volunteers want to help you connect with nature. They'd like you to see what bugs, birds, animals, and wild, naturally growing plants are right outside your front door.
Then, they want you to pull up your cell phone, open up the iNaturalist app and take a picture of whatever you see in nature.All this documentation is part of an international City Nature Challenge.Philadelphia, and the counties directly around it (Bucks, Delaware, Montgomery, Burlington, Camden and Gloucester Counties) are in competition with other cities around the world to find which city can document the most wild animal and plant life from Friday, April 29 through Monday, May 2.The iNaturalist app does most of documenting.
It tags your location and it tells you what you're seeing. If it can't identify what plant, mammal, bird, insect, fungus, or fish you're seeing, someone on the iNaturalist app community will.According to the City Nature Challenge Philadelphia organizers, even evidence of an animal will count toward the challenge. "A tree gnawed by a beaver can even count as two observations.
One for the tree and another for the beaver, even if you didn’t actually see the beaver."They say animal tracks, shells or even scat can also be identified by the app.The app uses artificial intelligence (AI) to identify what you're seeing.