Spring is here, and April showers bring May flowers as they say, but pollinators have already started their busy spring season in our parks! We love pollinators here at NRPA and to celebrate Earth Week, we held a pollinator BioBlitz at our headquarters. Our BioBlitz not only helped us see what plants and pollinators reside at HQ, but also helped us prep for the Parks for Pollinators BioBlitz campaign happening in June — which I hope you are signed up for!
Our BioBlitz, focused on pollinators and plants, took a snapshot of the pollinators that can be found here and the local flora that is available to support them. We had staff of all experience levels come out and participate — some seasoned naturalists and others professing no experience at all!
We used the iNaturalist platform and app to help run our BioBlitz. It made for an easy event as the app helps identify what participants found, shows what others have discovered and has a leaderboard to keep things competitive. We are also fortunate enough to have amazing parks around us and great local staff to help. We had a naturalist from Banshee Reeks Nature Preserve in Loudoun County, Virginia come out and help staff during our event. He was a great help to educate us about pollinators, their habits and how staff could personally help preserve their habitats.
Our BioBlitz ran for two hours and had 24 staff participate. In that time frame, we made 349 observations and identified 123 species. Staff had a great time and were excited about what they found and learned! You can see what we found through our project site on iNaturalist.
The observations that are made support the scientific community at large. All the observations are verified by a community of experts that participate on the iNaturalist platform. Observations go through a process of verification and ultimately end up as research-grade data if identifiable. Researchers from around the globe can use this information. Just in our event, we had identifiers from all around the United States and even Africa. They ranged from knowledgeable citizen scientists to Ph.Ds. and biologists!
To help capture all the pollinator fun, we did a Facebook live post. Check it out!
It was such a fun and easy event to host. We hope you can join us this June for our Parks for Pollinators BioBlitz. When you sign up, NRPA will send you toolkits that walk you through how to plan and execute the event as well as how to promote it to your community. Those that host an event will be entered to win $1,000 to help their pollinator efforts as well as one of three Scotts Miracle-Gro prize packs. We hope you’ll participate!