Take the ferry to our green oasis for a special guided tour to discover and connect with the wildlife that calls this place home. Get lost in and explore our 6-acre urban forest and our 4 massive hills. Learn how our resilient, built landscapes support biodiversity through an afternoon nature walk led by the Trust for Governors Island’s horticulture team and an insect ecologist. Governors Island staff, the Bee Conservancy, and volunteers will be onsite from 10 am to 2 pm to help you use iNaturalist to record all the wildlife you encounter during your visit. The walking tour will kick off at the Soissons Landing Welcome Center.

About the city nature challenge

Started in 2016 as a competition between San Francisco and Los Angeles, the City Nature Challenge (CNC) has grown into an international event, motivating people around the world to find and document wildlife in and around their cities, using biodiversity recording apps and platforms like iNaturalist. Run by the Community Science teams at the California Academy of Sciences and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, the CNC is an annual four-day global urban bio blitz at the end of April, where cities are in a collaboration-meets-friendly-competition to see not only what can be accomplished when we all work toward a common goal, but also which city can gather the most observations of nature, find the most species, and engage the most people in the event. In 2021, over 400 cities participated, with more than 52,000 people making over 1.2 million observations of nature in the four days of the challenge.

Time: 10:00 am — 2:00 pm EDT

Free!

Registration