The Spring 2016 Personal Bioblitz at Rutgers University starts March 1 and will run to May 15, 2016. Get on board with this easy project to reduce your 'species blindness' and to share your discoveries! It is free, fun, and fantastic!

The simple concept is that you record all the known and unknown species you see around you in everyday life wherever you are, as long as they are wild* species. The attached flyer has all the main details, as does our websites. (* wild = unassisted by humans in their living, so no pets and houseplants and salad bar plants.)

Join the Personal Bioblitzhere:
ProjectWebsite: http://tinyurl.com/PersonalBioblitz
Mailing list: http://tinyurl.com/RutgersBioblitzMail
iNaturalist: http://tinyurl.com/PersonalBioblitz2016
Facebook: http://tinyurl.com/RutgersBioblitzFB

Have you every wanted to learn more about the trees around you, figure out what those birds in shrubs by the driveway and the weeds under your car are, or wanted to know if the bugs and spiders that live under the porch or the basement are toxic? This is the time. It doesn't cost anything and you get to explore biodiversity wherever you are, all you need to do is to join this project.

The Personal Bioblitz is a collaborative species discovery project invented at Rutgers, and it is the third Personal Bioblitz. All you need is a digital camera (to take photos of unknown species) and a computer. There is even an app for the smartphone users for immediate upload of observations. After uploading your observations, you will get help with identification and you can also help out others to figure out what they have seen, as long as you have an uploaded photo of what you saw on the iNaturalist project website. You don't need to know anything at all about any kind of species at all. That is the whole point - to learn from those that know more, to share knowledge and discoveries, and together see what lives near us.

You can report one species or 500 during the 76 days, and it is totally up to you how much effort you want to put in after you join. We have hardcore birders that get p at 4 AM before class, and we have others that just want to learn the most common birds that you can see while looking out a window. Same for fungi, insects, trees, spring flowers, and so on. And if you travel to a more exotic place, you can upload the things you see there too, as long as they are seen during the bioblitz dates.

The Personal Bioblitz is open to all Rutgers affiliates, alumni and our friends and family. If you are into positive challenges, you can form a team with your kids, challenge your parent-in-law, get your undergrads to see if they can see more species than you, get your professor involved - the possibilities are endless for fun, cool biodiversity discovery that will result in real valuable research data and in your own increased knowledge about the real world around you.

Or just challenge yourself - can I see five new species per day? It gets easier and easier as spring is arriving too. Did you know that the average house has about 50 different arthropod species in it? And that there are over 100 species of weedy plants in the Rutgers parking lots? And that the most commonly reported animal from campus is.... Canada goose?

Take a look at this link to see what we saw together during the Spring 2015 bioblitzing and to see how this works:
http://www.inaturalist.org/projects/personal-bioblitz-spring-2015
Last years statistics: 80 people, 3123 species, and 11842 observations.
The number of reported species per person ranged from 1 to 860, and all observations count.

For more information, to sign up, and to spread the word - use the attached flyer and follow the links above. Future mailings will be sent out only via the Bioblitz Mailing list, on the Facebook group, and as information posted on the iNaturalist website. So join the mailing list to keep the information about the bioblitz coming.

Observations reported from Rutgers areas will also be added to the Flora and Fauna of Rutgers University Project, to keep building up our species list for the university:
http://www.inaturalist.org/projects/flora-and-fauna-of-rutgers-campus-new-jersey-usa

Have a great species hunting! And feel free to spread the word to your friends, family, and students.

Best
Lena Struwe
lena.struwe@rutgers.edu