Earth Day weekend events

This weekend NYMS members have an opportunity to participate in the 9th City Nature Challenge for New York City. You can get involved wherever you are in NYC. The City Nature Challenge helps to document the diversity of urban ecosystems and can help researchers better understand how organisms are adapting as the climate and built environment in our city changes. All you need is a smartphone and an iNaturalist account to get started.

To sign up for the New York City Nature Challenge, go to https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/city-nature-challenge-2025-new-york-city. Click the “Join” link in the upper right corner of the page. Then start documenting and identifying fungi and other taxa in the city. Make sure your photographs are good quality, well-lit, and in focus. You can take multiple pictures for each observation to highlight all of the features of a particular mushroom—gills, stipe, cap, etc. Try to identify your observations to the closest taxonomic rank as you can. Once you’re signed up, have joined the project, and are posting to iNat, any observations you upload in the city’s five boroughs from April 25 – April 28 will be included in the City Nature Challenge project for New York City.

There are also multiple FREE events all over New York during the four days of the City Nature Challenge. These events are all open to the public, but some do have limited space and require registration ahead of time. Fungi are featured with a walk by NYMS members Victoria Bayevskiy and Potter Palmer at Green-Wood Cemetery Sunday the 28th. Registration is recommended. There is also an event sponsored by the Van Cortlandt Park Alliance on Saturday the 27th, though fungi are not featured this year.