Plitvice joins City Nature Challenge

Plitvice Lakes National Park and Croatia’s Lika-Senj County will join the 2026 City Nature Challenge, a four-day biodiversity count running April 24 through April 27. (np-plitvicka-jezera.hr) The park said the Croatia effort is being organized by the Institute for Environment and Nature inside the Ministry of Environmental Protection and Green Transition. It said 12 Croatian counties now have co-organizers, more than in last year’s edition. (np-plitvicka-jezera.hr) The City Nature Challenge asks people to photograph wild plants, animals and fungi and upload those sightings to iNaturalist during the observation window. The 2026 global project lists April 24 to April 27 for observations. (inaturalist.org) The event began in 2016 as a competition between Los Angeles and San Francisco. The City Nature Challenge site now describes it as an international effort in which cities around the world share observations of urban nature. (citynaturechallenge.org) Organizers pitch the challenge as a way to build usable biodiversity records, not just a weekend outing. The participation guide says knowing what species are present and where they live helps scientists, land managers and communities study and protect local nature. (citynaturechallenge.org) That fits Plitvice’s role in Croatia’s protected-area system. The park says it became Croatia’s first national park on April 8, 1949, and UNESCO says it was added to the World Heritage List on October 26, 1979. (np-plitvicka-jezera.hr, whc.unesco.org) UNESCO’s listing centers on the park’s lake-and-waterfall system, formed as water deposits travertine barriers over thousands of years. UNESCO says those geological processes are still active today. (whc.unesco.org) The next step is simple: residents and visitors can make observations during April 24 to April 27, then the records move into the shared iNaturalist project for identification and counting. (inaturalist.org, citynaturechallenge.org)