Today 22 February 2026 is the first of the two celebration dates for National Wildlife Day (NWD) in the US, and this week is the National Invasive Species Awareness Week (NISAW). As a nature lover I’ve taken part in supporting these two national awareness campaigns for protecting wildlife and conserving their native habitats for several years, and once again holding a week-long grassroots event starting today at the Arcadia Ecohome, a Certified Wildlife Habitat awarded by National Wildlife Federation (NWF), with following activities:
1. As the operator of the Ecohome’s Certified Wildlife Habitat, I signed the online birthday card for celebrating the NWF’s 90th Birthday and took its quiz to learn about the NWF history and the Habitat program being launched in 1973. The NWF birthday card is attached to raise awareness of the significance of the organization in the US.
2. I took the NWF’s Clean Earth Challenge to engage a cleanup of the Ecohome’s Habitat kicking off today and throughout this week, with yard works to remove weeds and invasive plants from the Habitat. This yard work is timely after the rainstorms of last week that boost plant sprouting.
3. By reading NWF blogs today to update my knowledge of NWF activities, I take pride to learn that NWF certifies California State University, Dominguez Hills, where I served as an adjunct faculty in the past decade, as a Plastics Reduction Partner in 2025 for their campus-wide actions to reduce their plastic footprint.
4. As a nature lover I’m engaging scientific works in citizen science by visiting and working on a couple of public data platforms. For example, at iNaturalist site, today I completed the final step for my observation of two Western Fence Lizards submitted in 2025 and raised up the data to the “research grade”. I appreciate timely receiving the iNaturalist notice today about the submitted data and the final result. In light of the Ecohome being served as an observatory/lab for several citizen/community science projects. In addition, I’m sharing with such data platforms another observation with three photos of a beautiful Blue Jay visiting and staying at a tree in the Ecohome’s backyard in the last few days. We enjoyed the time of bird watching at the Habitat.
5. In my reading for knowledge and capacity building in the subject field, I’m glad to learn from the Sacramento Bee that the Yuba Water Agency awards $300,000 funding to restore the damaged fish habitat at the Lower Yuba River in California. On the other hand, based on an earth.com’s news report I, as a member of Nature Conservancy’s Reef Resilience Network, feel bad that the coral reefs and their habitability at Guam, the US Territory, face new threats from U.S. policy changes.
6. I shared a subject matter expert (SME) comment to a Facebook posting by UN-FAO about “soil sealing”. Based on my own experience at the Ecohome’s Certified Wildlife Habitat, my comment offers a nature/naturalization-based solutions to mitigate the issues resulted from existing impermeable pavements.
7. I’m submitting a CIEDM event to register with wildlifeday.org for support and participate in the UN’s World Wildlife Day on 3 March 2026. The event as in past years will be held at the Arcadia Ecohome’s Micro-forest, the Wildlife Habitat.
6. I’m sharing the event at citizen science platforms to raise public awareness of the two campaigns and what we as grassroots are doing.
Happy NWD and NISAW 2026!
Verify Your Email
Check your email (including spam!) and click on the provided link.
Until then, you won't be able to earn badges, or access other members-only features, but you can still browse thousands of projects and events!
