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Results tagged “species count” from BioBlitz Blog

1,364!

Posted on May 31, 2008 in Santa Monica Mts BioBlitz 2008 | 0 Comments

It's official: The 24-hour Santa Monica Mountains inventory has come to an end, but the party's just beginning!

Teams turned up 1,364 unique plant and animal species by noon today--more than twice the hoard volunteers ID'd in the same time at Rock Creek Park last year. More still will come in the days ahead as bio-sleuths resolve the identities of a slew of mystery species.

For now, at least, the breakdown looks like this:

Algae - 22
Amphibian - 4
Arthropod - 628
Bird - 86
Fish - 6
Lichen - 3
Mammal - 12
Marine Invertebrate - 91
Other Invertebrate - 2
Plant - 495
Reptile - 15

TOTAL - 1364

The Celebrate Biodiversity Festival's in full swing, with the Banana Slug String Band on the main stage. We'll have more updates in the hours to come, so stay tuned!

POSTED BY FORD COCHRAN/BIOBLITZ TEAM AT 1:26 PM PDT

330amspecies.jpgIt's 3:30 a.m. and quiet here at Base Camp.

There's still hot coffee--terrific news, since the temperature's down to the high 30s (Fahrenheit) and I can see every breath. A solitary National Park Service ranger still plugs away at a laptop, entering the names of observed and identified organisms into the master species database. The NG Maps crew continues to pin photos and stories to their interactive map. The night sky brims with stars and passing satellites.

Quietly in the dark, the Santa Monica Mountains BioBlitz marks a milestone: 683 logged species, more than turned up during the entire 'Blitz last year in Rock Creek Park (where at noon on Saturday the tally stood at 666). Subsequent species identifications brought that number up, but will likely do the same for the total here.

Biodiversity lives out there in the darkness, even if the very plants seem sound asleep.

Photograph by Ford Cochran

POSTED BY FORD COCHRAN/BIOBLITZ TEAM AT 3:30 AM

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Photo: Child holding praying mantis

To celebrate biodiversity and America’s parks, National Geographic is sponsoring and helping to host one BioBlitz each year through 2016, the centennial of the U.S. National Park Service. Join us in person if you can, or experience the events online and share your thoughts on our living chronicle, the BioBlitz blog.

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