BioBlitzes: The what and the why
On community science platforms like eBird.org and iNaturalist.org, hundreds of thousands of amateur volunteers with no special expertise in natural history catalog their observations of wild organisms in nature. While each individual normally collects data on a sporadic basis, when the efforts of these imperfect and irregular observers are pooled together, the result is a spectacularly comprehensive database of biodiversity
The concept behind a BioBlitz is, in essence, a microcosmic actualization of the core principle of community science - the power of amateurs in numbers to generate data. In English, a BioBlitz is an effort by community science volunteer contributors to intensively catalog as much biodiversity within a given manageable area as possible within a short span of time.
How does a BioBlitz work in practice? It’s quite simple - a coordinated group of community scientist volunteers split up the area to be surveyed ahead of time, and then go out to survey every organism they can find in their bite-sized chunk of land during the span of the BioBlitz, cataloging their sightings on a central database (usually iNaturalist.) The ideal result is that by the end of the BioBlitz, the biodiversity over the entire parcel of land at that moment in time has been comprehensively documented.
So what is the point of this intensification of the normally slow, long-run process of community science? Community science, as typically conducted, despite the high quality, granular data it produces, faces a massive shortcoming - it is unable to produce snapshots of ecological communities. At every given location on Earth, an intricate, complex community of thousands upon thousands of species exists, a community that changes dynamically over even short time scales. However, precisely due to this constant dynamism as well as the spread-out distribution of community science contributors, when conducted “as usual,” community science almost never presents the opportunity to gain a comprehensive understanding of a single community - in other words, the full profile of interacting biodiversity at a given location and moment in time. The BioBlitz concept provides a unique opportunity to fill this gap - to produce a snapshot of a particular ecological community through a comprehensive, communal effort. It is, in a sense, a way to utilize a human community to comprehend an ecological community.
