For the third consecutive year Siena ranks among the top five Italian cities participating in the City Nature Challenge 2024, the largest global friendly challenge between cities, this year held from 26 to 29 April, with citizen science or participatory science initiatives in the area urban.
These are the positions reached by Siena at the City Nature Challenge 2024 out of 14 cities according to the three parameters evaluated: third place for number of species photographed and identified (666), fourth for number of observers (63) and fifth for number of photographic, audio observations or video collections (1571) uploaded by observers to the international iNaturalist platform.
A great result achieved at the City Nature Challenge 2024 above all thanks to the BioBlitz Siena, the marathon organized by the Natural History Museum of the Accademia dei Fisiocritici in collaboration with Sienese environmental associations: it took place between 27 and 28 April in the urban green area of the Follonica Valley where, divided into seven shifts, almost 200 people, aged 3 and up, participated, guided by 18 naturalist experts to identify the highest number of species of living organisms and continue to survey Siena’s biodiversity.
Worthy of note is the exceptionally high ratio between the number of species identified and the number of observations collected, a sign of the great richness of Siena’s biodiversity. Among the species documented in Siena in particular, the minor orchid (Anacamptis morio), an orchid which, despite its beauty, should not be collected, because it is a species at risk like all wild orchids and an indicator of the healthiness of the soil .
Next autumn the Natural History Museum plans to publicly return the results of the first three years of initiatives, one of which is the BioBlitz, of the Siena BiodiverCity project which aims to survey Siena’s urban biodiversity.
Even on a global level, Siena did not disfigure itself, if we consider the presence of megacities such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, Buenos Aires, London, Madrid: out of 691 participating cities from all continents, Siena ranked 234th for number of observations, 195th for number of species and 229th for number of observers.
These are the 13 Italian cities participating in the ninth edition of the City Nature Challenge coordinated by the Italian Biodiversity Cluster, with the relevant bodies that registered for the race and organized the initiatives: Trinitapoli (House of Ramsar aps), Manduria (Regional nature reserves oriented of the eastern Taranto coast), Leverano (Ecomuseo Terra D’Arneo), Milazzo (MuMa – Museum of the Sea), Metropolitan City of Messina (AssoCea Messina Aps), Naples (City of Science), Marine Protected Area Kingdom of Nettuno, Portofino ( Outdoor Portofino), Siena (Natural History Museum of the Academy of Fisiocritics), Bergamo (Civic Museum of Natural History of Bergamo), Trieste (WWF Friuli Venezia Giulia), Trento and Predazzo (Muse – Science Museum).
