Hull City Nature Challenge 2025
The countdown until Hull’s City Nature Challenge 2025 has begun! You’re in the right place to find out what the City Nature Challenge is, how you can get involved, iNaturalist training, recording locations, 2024 results and more…
The City Nature Challenge (CNC) is a global nature-recording event, taking place in cities and regions across the world, every year. Hull took part for the first time in 2023 and will be taking part again in 2025 from the 25th - 28th April. This four-day bioblitz event started in 2016 and has grown exponentially, from 2 cities participating in its first year to over 450 cities and 2.4 million observations in 2024. The challenge encourages people to discover the biodiversity on their doorstep, make useful biological records, and engage in some friendly competition with cities around the world.
Organised by NEYEDC with the help of a team of local partners, the aim for the Hull City Nature Challenge 2025 remains to promote the collection of biological data across the city and encourage people to connect with the nature in their local green spaces, back gardens, nature reserves, and more. You can find details of how to take part, and how to join the Hull City Nature Challenge 2025 project on iNaturalist, below.
How can I get involved in 2025?
The City Nature Challenge primarily uses the app iNaturalist to make records.
No experience is needed to get involved - everyone can take part! On the event weekend, get out and about in Hull and record the plants and animals you find. This can be as simple as a walk around your local nature reserve, green space, park, or even exploring your own garden. Even if you can’t identify the species you’ve seen, once you’ve taken a photo and uploaded your observation to iNaturalist, the community of users within the app can help you with your ID.
iNaturalist can be downloaded onto mobile devices for free from the Apple Store or Google Play, or accessed via web browser. Any observations made within the city boundaries of Hull during the long weekend of 25th - 28th April 2025 will count towards the City Nature Challenge. You can also use iNaturalist to submit records throughout the year.
You can download iNaturalist for Android here or iPhone here, or use the browser version.
If you cannot use iNaturalist or are an established recorder, we can also accept traditional records in an excel sheet - please see our recording template below. For these records to be included they must be sent to NEYEDC by the 1st May so they can be integrated into the CNC totals.
To find out more about biological recording visit our General Interest page.
iNaturalist training
The Deep, with support from NEYEDC and the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust, will be holding two iNaturalist training sessions in the run up to the 2025 City Nature Challenge event. These ‘Wild Walks & Talks’ sessions are intended to get you started with iNaturalist and confident using the app to record. The sessions will comprise of a short presentation indoors before heading out to get some practice recording around the aquarium!
Both training sessions are free, but registering is required:
12th March, 3pm-4pm, The Deep, Hull - Wild Walks & Talks | The Deep
12th April, 10am-11am, The Deep, Hull - Wild Walks & Talks | The Deep
2024 Results
The Hull City Nature Challenge 2024 was a great success, seeing the city place #7 overall and #6 for species in the UK Leaderboard. 24 regions (or ‘cities’) took part across the UK this year, placing us in the top third of participants in the UK for both parameters. This is particularly impressive for a city like Hull, with a relatively small boundary and primarily urban habitats. Whilst the boundaries of some participating cities took in vast areas and encompassed a huge variety of habitats and sites, the challenge in Hull tried to remain true to the spirit of the event and was very much about looking deeper within the urban environment to highlight just how biodiverse such areas can be, whilst collecting records that can go on to influence conservation and decision-making in Hull.
Key statistics
We recorded a total of 7,047 observations in 2024, comprised of mainly iNaturalist observations plus some additional records collected in traditional spreadsheet format. This saw an increase of over 2,800 records compared to 2023! Those observations were made up of 1,188 different species.
Of the incredible 1,188 species recorded over the City Nature Challenge weekend, plants were the largest taxonomic group represented (43%), totalling 507 species. Insects were the next largest group (23%) with 207 species recorded, followed by fungi (15%) with 179, birds (5.7%) with 68, arachnids (4.1%) with 48, and molluscs (3.1%) with 36. Mammals and amphibians made up the remainder with some representation from smaller groups including chromista, fish, and protozoans. 2024 saw us record across a wider range of taxonomic groups than 2023, with more species represented in each group. One of our insect recorders also found a species new to Yorkshire in Hull over the CNC weekend!
You can read a full report of the 2024 event here.
Recording area
The boundary chosen by the Hull City Nature Challenge team reflects Hull’s official city boundary. Any records within this area made over the City Nature Challenge weekend will count towards our totals.