In April, more than 100,000 people from nearly 700 cities around the world set out on a mission to document as many plants and animals as they could in their urban environments.

The early results from this effort are in: Participants made more than 3.3 million observations of over 73,000 species, thousands of which are endangered.

The “City Nature Challenge” was coordinated by the nonprofit iNaturalist , which runs an app that allows users to snap a picture of a critter or vegetation in nature and upload it to a global system that will help with its identification. Together, the findings resemble a digital zoo; one participant in South Africa captured a photo of a web-like pretzel slime mold wrapping around a tree, while a user in the Philippines catalogued a hawksbill sea turtle resting

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