Celebrating California's Biodiversity

California is one of the most biodiverse regions in the world and is designated as a biodiversity hotspot—an area that contains exceptional concentrations of endemic plant and animal species (i.e., those that occur nowhere else)—but also experiences high rates of habitat loss. For example, California has over 6,500 types of native plants, of which over one-third are endemic. In 2018, Governor Brown established California Biodiversity Day, along with the Biodiversity Initiative. Since then, several Executive Orders and other actions by the Newsom administration, including the 30x30 Conservation Strategy, have built on this foundation to understand and protect California’s unique and precious natural resources.

In 2023, more than 20 state parks will be hosting Biodiversity Day events all over the state: from Bidwell-Sacramento River State Park in the north to Torrey Pines State Natural Reserve and Salton Sea State Recreation Area in the south. State Parks encourages the public to join an event or go out on their own to explore and appreciate California’s biodiversity and record species they observe with the iNaturalist app.  This is the same app used for the City Nature Challenge which is an international effort for people to find and document plants and wildlife in cities across the globe (see this post).

To learn more about various activities taking place to celebrate this year's California Biodiversity Day, please read the source article.