The Bioblitz: Good Science, Good Outreach, Good Fun in Three National Parks

By Gretchen M. Baker, Nancy Duncan, Ted Gostomski, Margaret A. Horner and David Manski; first published in Park Science 31(1), November 2014.

On a guided bird walk during a bioblitz at a small public park on Lake Superior in northern Wisconsin, a noisy flock of crows drew a group's eyes to the top of a pine. Crows make that racket when they are mobbing a predator, the leader explained — maybe an owl. The group watched, and suddenly a great horned owl took off with the crows close behind. The leader added it to the list; one participant went home knowing a trick for finding owls at midday.

Discoveries like that happen at every bioblitz, and they are exciting above all because the people making them are citizen scientists, many spending their first day in the field with professional naturalists.

What is a bioblitz?

Part contest, part festival, part lesson and part science, a bioblitz brings naturalists, scientists and the public together to find and record every plant and animal in an area, usually over 24 hours: songbirds at dawn, butterflies, fish and plants by day, moths, bats and owls at night. One day cannot find everything, but it gives managers a quick picture of what lives there — and participants a day outdoors.

A National Park Service employee coined the term in 1996 while organizing the first one, at Kenilworth Park and Aquatic Gardens in Washington, D.C.; more than half of the 90 scientists taking part, from federal agencies, the Smithsonian and local universities, had never been there. The idea has since spread worldwide. Parks hold them to document understudied groups, set a baseline, or introduce people to their park. The best known in the park system is the ongoing All-Taxa Biodiversity Inventory at Great Smoky Mountains, which is not limited to a day and aims to find every form of life in the park; the National Geographic Society also ran one in a different national park each year in the decade before the Park Service centennial in 2016.

Three parks show how different bioblitzes can be.

Acadia National Park: one group at a time

David Manski, then chief of resource management at Acadia, watches a volunteer collect moths at a light trap during the 2011 bioblitz. NPS / Diana Hunt.

Acadia has held a bioblitz every year since 2003, mostly on insects and spiders, sometimes adding mushrooms, algae and diatoms — ants in 2003, butterflies and moths in 2004 and 2011, beetles in 2005, 2013 and 2014, flies, spiders, true bugs, minor insect orders with mushrooms, bees, wasps and ants, and aquatic insects with algae. Most take one summer weekend at the Schoodic Education and Research Center: a day of collecting, the rest of the weekend (and sometimes longer) sorting, pinning and identifying.

• Who comes. Numbers are kept small so the event stays affordable. Participants are recruited mainly through the Maine Entomological Society; the Maine Forest Service, the University of Maine and the University of New Hampshire lend entomologists and equipment. The Schoodic Institute, the Park Service's nonprofit partner on the campus, houses and feeds them. One or two lead taxonomists receive up to $1,000 to run the event, teach, write a report, identify specimens and return labeled vouchers for the park's museum. The public is not recruited but never turned away, and a two-hour public session runs each time. Attendance ranges from 35 to 110, and about 75% come back.
• Where. Until 2011, collecting was limited to the park's Schoodic District, about 5 miles (8 km) east of Mount Desert Island; Mount Desert Island was added in 2012.
• How. Every collection gets a unique "lot" number tied to date, time, place and method, recorded in a database with GPS coordinates. At least one example of each morphospecies — a species defined by form alone — is pinned or preserved. Experienced entomologists identify, the lead taxonomist checks every identification, and hard cases go to other specialists; some groups have no specialist at all.
• Results. More than 1,600 voucher specimens are catalogued in Acadia's Charles Sawtelle Museum. The bioblitzes have produced many range extensions and more than 500 new park species records, over 100 of them new to Maine; the University of Maine published a technical report on the first nine years. And they have built a loyal circle of supporters of the park.

Mississippi National River and Recreation Area: wild in the city

Bioblitz participants along the Mississippi. NPS / Ted Gostomski.

Urban parks are easily overlooked amid their cities. This one, established in 1988, protects the history, industry and nature of a 72-mile (116 km) "working river" through Minneapolis and St. Paul, home to more than 667,000 people, and links a chain of city, county and state parks. With the University of Minnesota's Bell Museum of Natural History and the nonprofit Mississippi River Fund, the park holds bioblitzes at one site at a time — the method the Bell Museum already used — which saves staff time and money and gives a fuller picture of one place.

• Crosby Farm, the largest natural area in St. Paul's parks, drew more than 100 volunteers and scientists. They found two endangered mussels (the wartyback and the rock pocketbook), many fox snakes — perhaps a breeding population — and river otters, long absent from the riverway. A parkwide survey the next year found otters throughout the park's stretch of river, and park and U.S. Geological Survey biologists are now developing genetic markers to measure the population and its diversity.
• Ordway reached 611 species despite drizzle.
• Coldwater Spring: the Park Service acquired 29 of its acres from the U.S. Bureau of Mines in 2010, demolished a dozen abandoned buildings and began restoring oak savanna, wetland and prairie. One hundred volunteers aged 2 to 90 found 574 species; children loved catching bugs and small mammals and seeing fish from the river, and even an owl walk with no owls calling was a hit. The survey set a baseline for the restoration; the park plans to repeat it every five years.

University of Minnesota entomologist Anna Gerenday identifies a mushroom at the 2011 bioblitz at the Ordway Field Station. NPS / Ted Gostomski.

Species new to the park in 2009 led to follow-up studies of fungi, insects and frogs.

Great Basin National Park: filling the invertebrate gap

Since the park was established in 1986, its plants, mammals, birds, reptiles and fish have been well surveyed — but not its invertebrates. The park is small (77,000 acres) and remote (286 miles, 460 km, northeast of Las Vegas), so few experts and volunteers are close at hand, and much of it is hard to reach. Like Acadia, it focuses each bioblitz on one group. Staff learned the idea at the 2009 George Wright Society conference and partnered with Southern Utah University for the first.

It aims to inventory groups the Park Service's Inventory and Monitoring Program does not cover, turn citizen scientists into stewards, and build a reference collection. The focus each year depends on which lead taxonomist is available; that expert runs a workshop, demonstrates sampling, identifies specimens to family during the event and to the finest level by the next year. Budgets have run from $500 to $7,500, and the Nevada State Entomologist's office brings equipment, microscopes and staff. One participant, Dr. Ken Kingsley, volunteered as the park's first taxonomist-in-residence, spending a week a month in summer 2012 curating the growing collection.

Mayflies, stoneflies and caddisflies were chosen for 2015. A Colorado teacher brought a summer biology class in 2011; children, closer to the ground and endlessly curious, found insects and arachnids adults would have missed; and in 2013 arachnologist Dr. Paula Cushing's talk built around Charlotte's Web, with a live orbweaver to touch, turned some spider-fearing children into spider advocates.

The 2011 bioblitz found a possible species new to science (Acanthetropis sp. nov.), and the arachnid bioblitz added two orders, solifugids and scorpions, to the park list. More than 75 families have been added in all, and the results point to where more sampling is needed.

A job well done

If a bioblitz gives someone the thrill of finding a species new to science, or to the park — or of following the crows to a hidden owl — it has done its job.

Sources

• Gretchen M. Baker, Nancy Duncan, Ted Gostomski, Margaret A. Horner and David Manski, "The Bioblitz: Good Science, Good Outreach, Good Fun," Park Science 31(1), special issue, November 14, 2014; National Park Service. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/the-bioblitz-good-science-good-outreach-good-fun.htm
• D. S. Chandler, D. Manski, C. Donahue and A. Alyokhin, Biodiversity of the Schoodic Peninsula, Maine Agricultural and Forest Experiment Station Technical Bulletin 206, 2011.
• Two photographs from the Great Basin bioblitz, credited to David Hunter, are not reproduced here.
• Corrected: the page spells the arachnid order "Solfugids"; they are solifugids.