Exploring Greater Burlington
For the BioBlitz (and a good time) my friends and I spent Saturday walking around Rock Point and North Beach Park. We walked downtown in the morning, grabbed some breakfast and wandered around Rock Point for a couple hours. Our goal was to explore, find new areas we hadn’t been to yet this year, and document some species!
iNaturalist
Using iNaturalist to document the species I found was a bit difficult. I was having trouble uploading and making sure I was actually submitting my observations to the right project. Eventually I figured it out but I was only able to submit 5 observations because of the amount of service I had on my phone. However, I am glad I was able to contribute even a little bit to the 1088 overall observations the Greater Burlington iNaturalist project has currently. My favorite feature on iNaturalist is the species identification suggestions that it automatically produces. I was struggling to identify a specific kind of spruce, but iNaturalist helped me confirm that it was a Norway spruce.
Observed Species
Throughout the day I found several eastern white pines, lots of honeysuckle, eastern hemlocks, paper birches, and Norway spruces. I was only able to submit these 5 species to iNaturalist due to uploading issues. However, I also went out towards the thrust fault cove at Rock Point and found northern white cedars and lots of buckthorn in the Limestone Bluff Cedar Forest on top of the cliff. Overall, I identified 7 species.
Global Reports
Before this class, I had never heard of the City Nature Challenge. It is hard to comprehend just how many people around the globe are actively participating in the same project. Currently there are over 900,000 observations around the world. It is such an amazing feat of citizen science and I know it is going to have such a positive impact on global biodiversity data. I also love how active the San Francisco Bay Area is! I never thought of my hometown as a place of much biodiversity, but the iNaturalist reports are clearly proving me wrong. The Bay Area is currently in 8th place out of all of the cities in the Americas which is amazing!