LOS ANGELES — Where there are bees, there’s Lola Salgado.

“I love native bees,” she gushed. “I love talking about native bees. I love finding native bees.”

And when she finds them, she makes a beeline for her phone, taking photos with the verve of a Vogue cover shoot.

“Oh, that’s a good one!” she said, snapping away at a pollinator in a flower. “I love it when they give me a little spin.”

Salgado is a seed assistant at Theodore Payne Foundation, where native plants are in abundance, creating a feast for the bees and for Salgado’s photography. 

But this isn’t just a fun pastime. Salgado is a community scientist who uses the iNaturalist app to share her observations, some of which have been quite rare. Like the other day when she spotted an endangered bombus crotchii.

“I was like, oh my god! Is that you? Are you the one?” she cooed.

(Spectrum News/Tara Lynn Wagner)

It’s observations like this that Lila Higgins hopes to see more of this weekend during the City Nature Challenge. Higgins, who works at the Natural History Museum, co-founded the challenge nine years ago with Allison Young at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. 

It began as a friendly rivalry to see which city could garner the most community scientist observations on iNaturalist.

“And we had no clue that nine years later, we would have 690 cities all over the world taking part,” Higgins said with a laugh.

Which, honestly, taking part couldn’t be any simpler.

“You just need to find wildlife. Take a picture or a sound recording and then upload it to iNaturalist,” Higgins explained, counting three steps on her fingers. “Super easy.”

This year, Higgins, who is the museum’s co-senior manager for community science, is hoping to get 30,000 local observations, documenting 3,000 different species including plants, animals and fungi.

It’s fun, sure, but it’s also informative in a way that wouldn’t be possible without crowdsourced data collection.

For one thing, community scientists have access to places that scientists just can’t go, like their own backyards. Plus, there’s only so many scientists in the world.

(Spectrum News/Tara Lynn Wagner)

“Whereas we have hundreds of thousands of people that can take part and work with scientists to make these amazing discoveries,” Higgins explained.

Last year during the City Nature Challenge, museum staff says there were over 2,500 observations of rare and endangered species. Locally, Higgins says, folks uploaded photos of the slender-horned spine flower, a federally endangered plant species. Also, the Palos Verdes blue butterfly.

“Which is potentially one of the rarest butterflies in the entire world,” Higgins said with awe.

iNaturalist observations often end up in academic papers and the City Nature Challenge is the app’s most active weekend of the year. But outside of the challenge, being a community scientist just forces you to slow down and be present, and that can be pretty healing.

“We’re in a biodiversity crisis, a climate crisis, and sometimes it can feel really hopeless,” Higgins explained. “For me, collecting this data feels hopeful.”

Salgado agrees. Her phone is charged and ready for a big weekend of collecting. She loves knowing she is helping scientists gain more information about her beloved bees.

“You never know when you can make a discovery,” she beamed.

The City Nature Challenge kicked off on Friday at 12:01 a.m. in each time zone. Eligible observations can be collected through Monday, April 29 at 11:59 p.m. 

Details on the collected data will be announced on May 6.