03-06-2026: The City Nature Challenge 2026 – the results are in!

 

Thank you to everyone who took part in this year’s City Nature Challenge (CNC)

This is the link to the main results page for the challenge for the UK on the iNaturalist website and this is the link to the final results page of the challenge Though the figures vary a touch, as the main challenge page locks in the results at a set point in time; they show that, thanks to the collective efforts in London, we were able to achieve 20713 observations by 797 observers accounting for 1903 species, surpassing last year’s record levels of observations!!  

Thanks to the 861 identifiers who went through the observations, we managed to get 51% to Research Grade. This means that these observations will start to make it through UK recorder systems to local record centres such as the one in London which is Greenspace information for Greater London (GiGL). 

The break down for Kingston influenced observers. 

While we don’t have the figures yet for the observations generated via the events organised by Citizen Zoo, the data from events organised by Kingston University and members of the Kingston Biodiversity Network amounted to 22 participants recording in London (Kingston and other boroughs) (24 participants at the world level, as some folk took part on their holidays!); amounting to 5038 observations for the Greater London project and 5066 observations for the global project. 

A quick bit of maths means that Kingston’s contribution to the project this year was 24% of the observations!!!

Check out some of the images at the bottom of the blog taken during the surveys around Kingston this year. 

As one of the main challenges that we found during this and past CNC events, is getting people past the technological barrier of downloading and installing the app, and getting people’s accounts set up.

We hope to overcome this next year by running a few workshops, working with the Council’s Biodiversity Officer for Friends of Groups based in Kingston as well as individuals keen to record. Each group who attends will be asked to commit to surveying their local green space and also a few of the local roads around those green spaces during the 2027 challenge.  

CNC 2027 - the 100 by 100 Challenge.

We are already planning for 2027 and are issuing the 100 by 100 challenge to the people of Kingston!

• Our aim is to recruit 100 people from the community including all Friends of Groups, each committing to making 100 observations (minimum) during the four-day challenge in 2027.
• If we succeed, we would potentially generate 10,000 observations. and with a bit of training, we can try to maximise the quality of the observations to try to increase the chances of all of our project observations getting to Research Grade. 
• This will help build further on the baselining work of seeing what species we have scattered through the borough, highlight where there may be wildlife corridors and existing connections.

This can feed into projects such as the Kingston Wildways project being spearheaded by  Transition Town Kingston  and also the aims for Kingston Council’s Biodiversity Action Plan around getting people recording wildlife in Kingston. 

If you can contribute to the 100 by 100 challenge for the 2027 CNC, get in touch by emailing biodiversity@kingston.ac.uk and we can add you to the email list for when we secure training dates. 

Maps showing the rough areas where people recorded this year

Map showing areas we covered the CNC 2026

North Kingston areas and a bit of LB Wandworth

Areas surveyed around Kingston Town centre and east-ish

Kingston east of center!

Photos of some of the species seen during the Kingston run events:

Until next time. 

Sivi