Citizen Scientists Find Over 500 Species Living In This Latin American Mega-City

The Chingaza paramo, which provides 70% of Bogota’s drinking water. Andrew J Wight Bogota is the administrative and political capital of Colombia, but look a little closer and you’ll see that its also a hot-bed of biodiversity. Earlier in 2019, Bogota citizen scientists joined 35,00 participants from 159 other cities around the world, who collectively documented over 1000 rare, endangered and threatened species as part of the City Nature Challenge , founded by Lila Higgins and Alison Young in 2016. As part of the challenge, citizen scientists in Bogota used the iNaturalist scientific crowd-sourcing platform to make 2,570 research-grade observations of 544 species, including the Green Dotted Tree Frog , Striped Lightbulb Lizard and Sparkling Violetear . This city of more than 8 million people home to hundreds of species of insects and plants – appropriate for the capital of the world’s second most biodiverse country. Bogota also depends entirely on biodiversity to exist, as without the delicate paramo ecosystems on the city’s outskirts it would have little safe drinking water. The plants and mosses of the paramo trap moisture from the air , which eventually filters down as pure drinking water. Just one such paramo provides 70% of […]

Click here to view original web page at Citizen Scientists Find Over 500 Species Living In This Latin American Mega-City