ATHABASCA — Crooked Creek Conservancy (CCC) is giving everyone the opportunity to become hunters for a few days later this month.
The local ecology group is organizing a BioBlitz for the weekend of July 15-17 focusing on Athabasca County, but anyone is allowed to participate, said CCC member and BioBlitz coordinator Danna Schock.
“It's not something that rolls off the tongue for a lot of people, but a BioBlitz is a snapshot in time of all the organisms living in a particular location; who's here right now and what are they doing, and, in our case, we are focusing on Athabasca County,” she said in a June 24 interview.
Other than downloading the free app iNaturalist to your phone it doesn’t cost you anything but your time in the great outdoors exploring.
"To participate in the BioBlitz you need to take good pictures; you don't have to identify everything; you just need to be able to take good pictures that you can upload to iNaturalist and then there's experts who are part of that huge iNaturalist community who will help you identify it,” said Schock.
There’s no requirement to be an –ist – scientist, biologist, botanist, et cetera – just be curious and go on a walk.
“At this time of year people are going camping or they're going on these great excursions or they're just hanging out in their backyard, and they see interesting butterflies, any of those kinds of things,” she said.
Other than clear photos, when it comes to plants try to get every angle; the front and back of leaves, the stem both where it comes out of the ground and where it joins the head of the flower. Those details make it easier for botanists to identify a particular plant.
“An expert would look at those pictures, they could say, ‘A-ha, I know that's this species of plant.’”
Which was something Schock herself encountered a few years ago when she posted photos of freshwater mussels.
I was out at Jackfish Lake a couple summers ago; I found some freshwater mussels and there is a person who lives in Montreal and his passion is freshwater mussels,” said Schock. “And he was able to identify stuff for us. So, that's what I mean, it's so much bigger than just Crooked Creek and it's a real way to contribute meaningful data about the things that we share this space with. So, I really hope that we get people from all walks of life coming and joining in.”
A BioBlitz is part of a larger movement called Citizen Science, which encourages anyone to share information about species of flora and fauna they see in their area – that wood frog in your backyard might be an old friend to you but to scientists who data mine the species uploaded to iNaturalist and similar apps, it’s a gold mine.
“There’s actual hardcore scientists working for organizations like the Canadian Wildlife Federation and Environment and Climate Change Canada and they’re documenting things like species distribution and timing of flowering which is something that can be an indicator of climate change or any other sort of environmental change,” said Schock.
And while the iNaturalist app is very easy to use, Schock is prepared to help anyone who has any questions.
“Crooked Creek will have a couple of opportunities to meet either in person or by virtual, where I'll get on the computer or meet up down at Riverfront Park and I can help people use that app,” she said.
It really is as easy as downloading the app, creating a free account and searching ‘Athabasca County BioBlitz.’ You can also join the Crooked Creek Conservancy group.
“Crooked Creek is planning to report back to all the participants how many people took part, what species were found, all of that good stuff,” said Schock. "Within a couple of weeks, we’ll send out a thing saying, ‘We found this, we found that.’”
And there’s prizes!
“We're going to have prizes for categories like the greatest number of species, the most yellow species found,” she said. “If you’re taking pictures of yellow organisms and you find some Marsh marigold, yellow lichens, and maybe you find a yellow bug, we have prizes for that.”
Ideally, the group, which is open for anyone to join, would like to host a BioBlitz in all four seasons to look for trends across the boreal forest as well as locally but if this is the only one, it will still be worth it.
“Even if this ends up being the only one that happens, the value is not diminished because those data are captured forever now,” she said. “But we would like to host this even seasonally so we would get a snapshot of each of the seasons; who is here and what are they doing and then that gives us some information about what's happening in the county of Athabasca.”
It’s a family friendly event and you can go wander around your farm or drive out to a lake with the kids and take pictures of all the plants, bugs, and animals you see; everything is fair game from butterflies to moss.
“If it's for one hour, that's great, if it's for all three days, that's great, there's no requirement of time of day or length of time or anything else," said Schock. “It's just got to be in that window of July 15 to 17.”
To register, so you can get prizes, or to get more information contact Schock at [email protected].
