Parks for Pollinators is a national campaign to raise awareness and community involvement in the pollinator crisis through local parks and recreation and like-minded organizations. NRPA and The Scotts Miracle-Gro Foundation are challenging local parks to get involved and host a pollinator BioBlitz during September.

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Sign Up to Host a BioBlitz this September to Engage Your Community in Pollinator Awareness

If your agency signs up to host an event during the month of September, they will also be entered to win one of three $1,000 prizes and one of three Scotts Miracle-Gro prize packs to help with your pollinator habitats or programs!

 By signing up you will:

  • Receive a toolkit explaining how to host and manage your events.
  • Receive a marketing toolkit with sample social media posts, email copy and a template press release.
  • Commit to support the Parks for Pollinators campaign, focused on raising public awareness of the current pollinator crisis by encouraging local action and positioning parks as a national leader in advancing pollinator health and native habitat.

What’s a BioBlitz?

The Parks for Pollinators BioBlitz is an event where community members work with park staff to create a snapshot of the variety of wildlife that can be found in local parks. To participate, community members will use an app to take pictures of plants, insects and animals to see what wildlife is present in the park on the day of the event and provide the park system with more information about local pollinators, which are essential to our ecosystem.

During our fifth annual Parks for Pollinators BioBlitz in September 2023, more than 200 individuals pledged to help pollinators and learn how to host a BioBlitz. Events were organized from coast to coast, with 26 states represented from Washington to Florida. These groups recorded more than 36,000 observations, documenting thousands of species of both pollinators and pollinator-supporting plants. Nearly 3,500 people participated in the national BioBlitz to record these findings, and nearly 2,000 experts helped identify the findings using iNaturalist. You can check out the results here — you can even see what pollinators were found near you in our iNaturalist page!

Why Host an Event?

Hosting a Parks for Pollinators BioBlitz event allows your community to explore your parks, to engage in environmental issues, and to see how many pollinators and pollinator-friendly plants they can find. You can even make a competition out of it to see who can find the most species. Your BioBlitz will produce data specific to your parks and community. The results of all the local BioBlitz events will be incorporated into the national campaign to show how parks across the country are supporting pollinators in their local spaces.

Your agency can use that data from the event to create an inventory of the species (pollinators and plants) found in your local parks. This can be a valuable tool to better manage your open spaces and help you create your future management and sustainability plans. You can also grow your environmental education and engage a whole new group of volunteers and future park ambassadors! Read about the possibilities here.

According to agencies who have participated in our BioBlitz:

  • Fifty-five percent were hosting a BioBlitz event for the first time.
  • Half of agencies held virtual events, and many held both in-person and virtual events; this program is flexible.
  • Most found NRPA’s resources and assistance extremely helpful for creating and hosting a BioBlitz
  • The majority continue to host their own BioBlitz events and to participate in the Parks for Pollinators BioBlitz in subsequent years.

Agencies use what they learned to: 

  • Bolster their environmental education.
  • Grow their volunteers and support from the community.
  • Plan, restore and manage their parks to be more habitat and pollinator-friendly.
  • Influence and engage others such as elected officials, leadership, planners, maintenance staff, partners.
  • Start an annual collection project to assess biodiversity for their parks’ species inventories.
  • Advance sustainability practices for their agency and community

This is a great opportunity to engage your community members in a community science event while promoting pollinator awareness and education.

How Does it Work?

The Parks for Pollinators BioBlitz is hosted on iNaturalist. Park and recreation agencies who participate will create a local campaign under NRPA’s national Parks for Pollinators BioBlitz campaign. Instructions for how to do this are included in the BioBlitz toolkit you will receive after signing up.

NRPA BioBlitz iNaturalist

 

 

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