From kelp forests to city gardens, residents of Cape Town have wild-spotted more than 3,500 species in a fun citizen-science challenge that also helps to boost conservation.
00:00A nursery web spider that is about to be spotted by a class of school children passing by.
00:10With the help of an app, 12-year-old Lakeisha and her classmates are identifying animals and plants in a Cape Town nature park.
00:19I've seen lots of things. I've seen beautiful flowers, the pretty bushes, and I've seen this big snail
00:27that I kept in my hand and that was fun. And the spiderwebs are just so much.
00:35Being here today is such a wonderful experience. It's so unique and everything about it is just so mesmerizing.
00:44Lakeisha and her class are taking part in the iNaturalist City Nature Challenge.
00:49The international competition takes place once a year. Any city can participate.
00:54It encourages local residents to get interested in nature and helps collect data too.
01:02Cape Town has been taking part for several years.
01:05During the four days of the challenge, entry to the city's nature parks is free.
01:10The parks support a wide array of species.
01:13South Africa is the third most biodiverse country in Africa.
01:17The Cape Town authorities welcome the competition.
01:19The challenge and the iNaturalist app definitely helps the city of Cape Town to record the species that we find in our reserves.
01:30So as the staff, we go out and do bioblitzers.
01:33We add species to the list and this challenge, of course, helps tremendously
01:38because you're adding much more than you would on a daily basis.
01:42The 2025 challenge saw more than 1,000 people take part in Cape Town.
01:48The city where two oceans meet also has a rich underwater world.
01:54The kelp forests are especially famous.
01:57The large brown algae is home to hundreds of marine species, sharks and octopus included.
02:04Amateur divers and snorkelers also get involved.
02:07Normally, it's mainly just scientists and tourists that get to explore this unique ecosystem.
02:13With the field of science, which is obviously very interrelated with the natural environment,
02:18it can be quite exclusionary and not accessible to the average citizen.
02:22And what's so great about a challenge like this is that it sort of bridges that gap
02:26and you've got your local citizens uploading and taking pictures online naturalists
02:31and engaging with the marine environment.
02:33And in terms of the underwater world, I think that's even less accessible for a lot of people.
02:37And people don't really engage with it.
02:38So something like this, I think, gets people interested and, you know, that inspires conservation.
02:44The citizen scientists upload thousands of photos to the app.
02:49Taking good photos underwater can be challenging.
02:52Georgina Jones has taken part many times.
02:55She says it can be a rough ride.
02:57Goodness, we've never had decent conditions.
03:00Every single time we've done the City Nature Challenge, we've had either super rough seas, super high winds, super low temperatures.
03:10This year, we had, I think it was 10 degrees at the bottom and not too dirty and reasonably flat.
03:19But it was hard.
03:22It was hard.
03:23We didn't have a lot of wind, so the tidal pooling was easy at least.
03:29But underwater was, as per the last six years, hard work.
03:36This year, the citizen scientists recorded over 3,500 plant and animal species in the kelp forests, nature parks and city gardens of Cape Town.
03:47The staff who's responsible then takes off the species that we've added for a specific site, sorry, for a specific site.
03:56And that helps them to monitor what species we have.
04:00They look also at what species might have been present in the past.
04:04And then if there's other management interventions that need to take place to bring back species that perhaps are missing,
04:12that we haven't seen in recent years, that's been in the past.
04:15So it does help.
04:16The data is especially interesting for scientists.
04:21The challenge offers a huge boost to research.
04:25As we go into the future, we're going to use data in ways which we can't even imagine now.
04:29Things like the climate change questions like early flowering, late flowering, and problems with, say, pyrethroids.
04:36Are our pollinators declining?
04:38Those are the sort of questions we're going to be able to answer.
04:41The participants, whether young or old, get to have fun and become more aware of the fragile ecosystems around them.
04:50Myrna Schultz says passing on this awareness and enjoyment of nature is the best part of her job.
04:55Biodiversity to the city is so important.
04:59Having these nature reserves in an urban environment, like today we have the kids being able to come and do environmental education at the reserve.
05:07So that's, I mean, I love that job, that's my job, but I absolutely love it.
05:12So that's quite important, having open spaces for people to come and relax, to walk, just having fresh air around them.
05:19Every year, hundreds of cities worldwide take part in the challenge.
05:24Cape Town landed in 12th place this year, with 36,000 observations.
05:30Perhaps next year this class will participate again and make another great contribution to science.
05:35Cape Town landed in 12th place this year, with 36,000 observations.
