Western Biodiversity Challenge & Art Contest

Exploring biodiversity in the West

The submission period is over, and we’re grateful for your many wonderful submissions! We’ll be in touch with participants in June.

What: Learn about western biodiversity, join one of our projects, or engage with plants, places, animals, or life around you in some way. Then, submit something that reflects the life and places in the West that you love most. You can submit poetry, visual art, music, film, dance, photography, or another type of work. The deadline is May 17, 2022.

Who: Anyone can submit. Whether you’ve practiced art all your life or this is your first attempt, we want to hear from you. All submissions related to biodiversity in the West are welcome.

Why: Our hope is to celebrate and connect with what’s around us. We’ll be selecting a few submissions to specifically honor with awards, but we’ll share and honor as many as we can on our social media, emails, website, and other communications.

Celebrating biodiversity, or the variety of life around us

If we were to boil our work down to one word, it might be this: life.

From toadlets resting on a desert pond like bubbles to elk bedded in long mountain shadows, the life around us is what colors our existence. Sure, plants, animals, insects, and landscapes sustain our own lives with what we need. But there is a deeper hum drawing humans to places and beings so different from us.

Over the past 25 years, our team and community have dedicated our work to the diversity of life that surrounds us. We’ve counted plump bumblebees and watched cougar eyes flicker in the light of our wildlife cameras. We’ve plunged our hands into cold streams to restore their vibrance. We’ve waited in the snow, bundled up with clipboards at the ready, for the hopeful pink flash of a rosy-finch.

Individuals and groups of all kinds have joined us to support the well-being of wild lives in the face of habitat loss and changing climates. Through the power of community science, we’ve gotten to know species and places that need help, allowing our scientists and partners to plan for their conservation. Engagement with so many lives allows us to face complex issues with sincere hope.

Now, as Earth Day approaches, we reflect on the many lives and places that constitute the reason we do what we do. The textured fabric we are woven into provides us with beauty, joy, and life. We believe that future generations deserve to experience this wild diversity of existence, and that life itself deserves to continue.

We invite you to join us as we celebrate biodiversity, or the variety of life around us.