From April 24 to April 27, 2026, the Plitvice Lakes National Park and the Lika-Senj County area will participate in the City Nature Challenge.
The City Nature Challenge (CNC) began in the United States in 2016, when employees of the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History and the California Academy of Sciences created a friendly competition between the cities of San Francisco and Los Angeles. The competition was organized to see which city could record the largest number of plant and animal species with the largest number of participants over 8 days. Over the following years, an increasing number of cities have joined this initiative and invited their residents (or visitors) to find and document the urban biodiversity. In just 6 years, the CNC has developed into an internationally recognized urban bioblitz event.
The collection of records is carried out through media, most often photographs, and is shared on the virtual platform iNaturalist. It is an open approach that leads to data on the presence of plant and animal species. Once the observations are transferred to the virtual platform, they can be seen and identified by the entire community within the platform. The flexible nature of this methodology and its inclusiveness in terms of participation is precisely what has driven its rapid adoption around the world.
The City Nature Challenge in Croatia is organized by the Institute for Environment and Nature (Ministry of Environmental Protection and Green Transition) and compared to last year, there are now significantly more co-organizers covering 12 counties among which are Plitvice Lakes National Park and Lika-Senj County.
How to join the challenge and conduct observations and input of wild plant and animal species please check on these photos:
Remark: All photos are used with the approval of City Nature Challenge community for co-organizers
