National Parks BioBlitz: Washington DC
May 20-21, 2016. On May 20-21, 2016, National Capital Region parks will host the National Parks BioBlitz – Washington D.C., a cornerstone event to celebrate the centennial of the National Park Service and Call to Action Goal #7 Next Generation Stewards. The BioBlitz is a 24-hour event intended to document and celebrate the biodiversity that exists in our national parks. Throughout the BioBlitz, we will be using teams, comprised of scientists and naturalists working alongside students, teachers, and you, the stewards of our National Parks, to conduct focused species inventories. The ecological heterogeneity of the parks affords many opportunities to catalog, record, and study diverse organisms, ecological interactions, and biodiversity on a range of spatial and temporal scales. Concurrent with the BioBlitz inventories, we will host a Biodiversity Festival at Constitution Gardens on the National Mall. The festival will include public presentations about biodiversity, nature inspired entertainment, structured scientific field activities, demonstrations of field technology, and exhibits ranging from global biodiversity and citizen science initiatives to art and wildlife photography. Sign-up today to serve as an Inventory Leader, to be an iNaturalist Pro-Observer, to bring your classroom outside, or to be a citizen scientist. Or help us identify observations from the event, by going through pictures on iNaturalist.org.
