City Nature Challenge 2022 - New York City

The annual City Nature Challenge (CNC) is this weekend, from Friday April 29 through Monday May 2. I put together a presentation on Slideshare with a brief overview of New York City's participation in CNC.

I'm one of the Brooklyn Borough Captains for the NYC Battle of the Boroughs, a friendly inter-borough competition among the boroughs to promote CNC participation across NYC. Following is a list of all the planned events and participating greenspaces in Brooklyn. You can also find this list on the Brooklyn CNC 2022 iNaturalist Project Journal.

iNaturalist Workshops at GrowTogether, 4/22 & 4/23

It's a busy season for me this Spring! NEXT WEEK is New York City NYC's GreenThumb community gardening program annual conference, known as GrowTogether:

Part 2 of the GreenThumb GrowTogether conference will be hosted in-person in community gardens in all five boroughs in celebration of Earth Week. Join us for workshops about growing food, healthy eating, native pollinators, flower arrangement, planting seeds, screen printing garden swag, volunteer projects, and more. All the activities are free and open to the public!

... The theme of this year’s GrowTogether is “Deeply Rooted: Growing Community Connections.” Community gardeners from across New York City have been gathering at the GrowTogether conference each spring since 1984 to celebrate the start of the garden season with a day of learning, networking, and reconnecting with friends. - Ibid.

- 38th Annual GreenThumb GrowTogether Conference Part 2 Conference Guide

As noted above, all GrowTogether workshops are open to the public. Please register, as some workshops have limited capacity.

This is my first time participating in GrowTogether. I'll be giving two different workshops on how to use iNaturalist, Friday in Brooklyn, and Saturday on Staten Island.

Torrey Lecture, Wednesday March 30

2022-04-07: The recording is online on the Torrey Botanical Society YouTube channel.

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I am proud to announce that I will be co-presenting, with Zihao Wang, a Lecture of the Torrey Botanical Society on Wednesday March 30 at 6pm. The title of the talk is "City Nature Challenge (CNC) 2022: For Plant-lovers and Botanists Alike."

Note that the information we present will be applicable to iNaturalist users and City Nature Challenge observers and identifiers anywhere in the world! So, whereever you are, please join us if you can.

Abstract

Unlike most other citizen science platforms, iNaturalist allows anyone to record their observations of any living thing anywhere in the world. As it approaches 100 million Observations worldwide, it has become increasingly important to botany and other biological sciences. City Nature Challenge, based on iNaturalist, engages community members in cities and urbanized areas around the world to make observations, and provides opportunities for taxonomic experts to identify them, all over the world. Last year over 400 cities participated, with over 50,000 people documenting over 45,000 species with over 1.2 million observations, the largest bioblitz in the world. In this Torrey Talk, two iNaturalist experts will show how you can participate in iNaturalist and this year’s upcoming City Nature Challenge.

Registration

Date: 2022-03-30
Time: 6pm EDT (GMT-04:00)
Duration: 1 hour
Registration: Zoom

The talk will be recorded and made available on the Torrey YouTube channel sometime after the event. Please subscribe to our channel and enable notifications so you get updated when we publish new recordings!

Related Content

Links

Torrey Botanical Society

Native Plant Profile: Amelanchier

I could probably talk about Amelanchier until my voice gave out (at least an hour!). It's such a great multi-season plant in the garden, and brings so much value to wildlife, as well. It's also a great example of how native plants convey a "sense of place" that is not imparted by conventional, non-native plants in the garden.

Although the Genus is distributed across the Northern hemisphere, the greatest diversity is found in North America. As you can see from the BONAP distribution map, Amelanchier diversity is the greatest in the Northeast. New York State hosts 14 species, varieties, natural hybrids, and subspecies. And New York City is home to 6 of those.

Amelanchier in my garden

Amelanchier was one of the key plants I included in my backyard native plant garden design in 2009. To fit my design, I needed a tree form with a single trunk and broad canopy.

Insect Year in Review 2021

Observing the diversity of life that coexists in one place is one of the rewards of visiting the same natural area over a long period of time. My garden not only offers myself and passersby such an observatory. It's also a laboratory in which I can research how insects engage with their environment - both biotic and abiotic - and imagine, design, and create habitat to better provide for their needs.

I use iNaturalist to document the diversity of life in my garden. Although I only posted my first iNaturalist Observation in 2017, my garden Observations now span more than a decade. As of this year, I've documented over 400 insect species making use of my garden.

This biodiversity, and my documentation of it, is intentional. And although all of this is by design, all I can do is uncover the latent urban biodiversity in and around my garden. Each new species I find is a surprise to me.

Standing Still 2021: Demeter Waiting

Today is the December solstice: the winter solstice in my hometown Northern hemisphere, summer in the Southern.

Persephone and her Pomegranate

The millenia-old story of Persephone and her pomegranate, in all their incarnations, strikes me as a deeper analogy this Winter. Persephone was abducted, held hostage in hell, and starved. Only under this extreme duress did she eat anything she was offered: a few seeds of the pomegranate to stave her hunger.

I can relate to "being held hostage in hell". I feel as though I've endured six years of it. I know others do, as well.

Garden Design Pattern Languages

Adapted from a tweet thread.

In a guest post on the ASLA's "Dirt" column, Alden E. Stone, CEO of Nature Sacred, writes:

[Our new report] is part research and part practical guide, and shares key insights gained through having co-created more than 100 Sacred Places across the country in communities, many under-resourced; in prisons, at universities, and in hospitals. A handful of these sites were also implemented as part of an expansive, decade-long design, build, and research project. ...

For the research portion of this paper, we focused our attention on four domains: nature’s impact on individual, community, economic and ecological health. ...

for many of the individual and community health benefits to kick in, people must engage with nature. Spend time in the green space. And this is where Nature Sacred has spent a lot of energy over the past two decades — looking at how to best engage the community and how to best design so that the community embraces, and spends time in, their green space.

She describes four "design elements":

• Portal
• Path
• Destination
• Surround

These design patterns recur in many different types of gardens, whether intentionally healing/sacred or not.

My backyard embodies all four elements. What follows is an exploration of the history of my backyard, from inception to its current state, viewed through the frame of those four design elements.

Names

2022-12-01 (World AIDS Day): Added more Related Content links.

2022-09-20: Where available, added locations of panels in the AIDS Quilt.

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These are some of the people, all men, I have lost over the years, nearly all to AIDS. With the exceptions of those additions noted, I stopped actively maintaining this list in 1994. In alphabetical order.

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• William "Wolf" Agress, a lover, died in 1990
• Andre, a bartender at the Tunnel Bar in the East Village, now defunct
• Vincent Barnes
• Jerry Bihm
• Bobby
• Colin Curran
• Erez Dror, co-owner and -founder of the Black Hound Bakery in the East Village, New York City, now defunct (AIDS Quilt Block #3452)
• Jeffrey "Jeff" Glidden, 1958-1987, a lover (AIDS Quilt Blocks #0912 and #5320)
• Paul "Griff" Griffin
• Martin Noel Jorda
• David Kirschenbaum, 1962-1993, community organizer with the New York City Gay & Lesbian Anti-Violence Project
• Art "Artie" Kohn, 1947-1991, founder of the BackRoom BBS in New York City, now defunct (AIDS Quilt Block #2324)
• John Larsen, a lover, died 2007 (Added 2021-12-01)
• Jim Lewis
• Luis
• John Mangano, 1955-1991 (AIDS Quilt Block #3613)
• Jeffrey Martin
• Morris Matthews
• David Mayer (Added 2021-12-01)
• Karl Michalak, 1958-1997
• Mark Melvin, 1962-08-27 - 1992-06-03 (AIDS Quilt Block #2828)
• Norm
• Tony Panico, my first lover in New York City, and the first person close to me to die from AIDS. His name appears twice on the AIDS Memorial Quilt, the first on Panel 05A when it was displayed in 1988. (AIDS Quilt Blocks #0046 and #0652)
• Charles Pope, barfly extraordinaire
• Gordon Provencher, 1955-1992 (AIDS Quilt Block #2291)
• Tom Raleigh
• Craig Rodwell, 1940-1993, founder of the Oscar Wilde Bookstore in Greenwich Village, NYC
• Tony Rostron
• Jurgen Schmitt
• Giulio Sorrentino
• Buddy Volani
• Jeremy Wells
• David Joseph Wilcox, 1957-1996

Grief and Gardening: Extinct Plants of northern North America 2021

As in past years, I'm limiting this list to northern North America for two reasons:

1. Restricting this list geographically is in keeping with my specialization in plants native to northeastern North America.
2. There are many more tropical plants, and plant extinctions, than I can manage.

Last year, this paper:

Vascular plant extinction in the continental United States and Canada

caused me to expand my list from 6 to 59 species, including 7 extinct in the wild. The summary is terse, and grim:

Hot Sheets Habitat

My garden is registered as both a National Wildlife Federation Backyard Wildlife Habitat and Xerces Society Pollinator Habitat. The insects have certainly gotten the message. During 2021, I've been able to document 14 different species of insects mating in my garden.

1. Acanthoscelidius acephalus, minute seed weevil
2. Epitrix fuscula
3. Harmonia axyridis, multi-colored lady beetle (introduced)
4. Eumerus
5. Orthonevra nitida, wavy mucksucker
6. Syritta pipiens, compost fly (introduced)
7. Toxomerus geminatus, Eastern calligrapher fly
8. Toxomerus marginatus, margined calligrapher fly
9. Xenox tigrinus, tiger bee fly
10. Jalysus, stilt bug
11. Lygaeus kalmii ssp. angustomarginatus, Eastern small milkweed bug
12. Hylaeus modestus, modest masked bee
13. Xylocopa virginica, large Eastern carpenter bee
14. Danaus plexxipus, monarch butterfly