April 23rd, 2024 | By Camille Jasinski
BioActNet and HI-BON Collaborate with the Hakai Institute for the 2024 Quadra Island BioBlitz
This week marks the official start of the 2024 BioBlitz on Quadra Island. A BioBlitz is an intense effort to catalog all life in a given area during a limited amount of time. Scientists, citizens, and organizations come together for these marathon biological surveys to gather data about the natural world and discover new species. This year, the Hakai Institute is hosting an intensive three-week BioBlitz on British Columbia’s Quadra Island, a collaborative effort between invited scientists and taxonomic experts from Canada and the US, and the UN Ocean Decade Endorsed projects the Biodiversity Action Network (BioActNet) and the Hakai Institute Biomolecular Observing Network (HI-BON). These surveys hope to identify and catalog as many new species as possible.
The Biodiversity Action Network (BioActNet) is a project endorsed by the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science. BioActNet is a network across British Columbia and Washington that fosters transboundary marine biodiversity science and stewardship to inform action-oriented conservation and management. It is a network of scientists, decision makers, educators, and community members from across the Salish Sea, driving the co-design and co-development of marine biodiversity knowledge to better inform planning, management, and policy on both sides of the border.
A recent BioBlitz hosted by the Institute for Multidisciplinary Research in the Salish Sea (IMERSS) and supported by BioActNet and member organizations including the Hakai Institute, was successfully held on Galiano Island in late spring of 2023 and had over 100 participants including community members, experts, and students. The results of this BioBlitz have cataloged over 1,600 observations and counting - with over 600 species observed.
This year’s BioBlitz is also working in partnership with the Hakai Biomolecular Observing Network (HI-BON) to increase the genetic work of this BioBlitz and include a large eDNA barcoding component to help build a local reference database, particularly for marine species which are under represented in these databases. Additionally, there will be a push to get as many high quality research grade specimens into museums so they are available for future research and biodiversity data.
Each week the biodiversity surveys will have a different focus with different sampling and collection methods.- The first week will focus on terrestrial biodiversity such as insects, lichens, plants, mosses, and birds; the second week will focus on subtidal marine biodiversity, such as benthic marine invertebrates, parasites, zooplankton, phytoplankton, and seaweed; and the final week will focus on subtidal and intertidal marine biodiversity.
The Hakai Institute is also hosting a number of community engagement opportunities to showcase the exciting work that’s been done at previous BioBlitzes, where a number of new genetic sequences were discovered and added to databases, and to engage community members in the work being done by invited scientists on Quadra. An art-science component is also being incorporated, where Hakai staff will be encouraging elementary school students and members of the community to be inspired by and depict some of the species being collected during the Blitz. Make sure to follow the Hakai Institute for more information and updates on this collaborative biodiversity effort!
Check out the poster below for community events that you can be involved with!
