ANN ARBOR—Four days, 10,000 acres, 20 scientists, 73 students, and myriad bugs, birds, botanical specimens and other living things. It all adds up to the University of Michigan Biological Station’s BioBlitz, a one-shot attempt to find, identify and document the assortment of species inhabiting the field station’s forests, fields and waters.

“It’s like the Olympics of biodiversity,” said BioBlitz organizer Brian Scholtens.

The event, to be held at the Pellston, Mich. station July 5-8, will tap the expertise of UMBS faculty, as well as specialists who are coming in just for the event, and will involve students enrolled in the station’s summer courses. And if four days of tromping through bogs, plains and woodlands, swinging nets, setting live traps and peering through hand lenses, binoculars and microscopes don’t provide enough exposure to the wonders of the natural world, there’s more. The event also features public lectures by world-renowned caterpillar authority David L. Wagner, a man who admires creatures with names like horrid zale and monkey slug and who marvels at resemblance of the orange dog caterpillar to bird droppings.

In addition, SEE-North, a science, math and environmental education center in Petoskey, is assembling a group of 5th through 8th graders to participate in one day of the event. The program will include biodiversity-themed activities and a caterpillar workshop led by Wagner. Registration (through SEE-North, http://seenorth.org/) is required.

Coordinating a BioBlitz is an exercise in logistics, said Scholtens, an associate professor of biology at the College of Charleston in South Carolina who teaches at UMBS during the summer session and has participated in several other BioBlitzes in Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

“First you decide on starting and ending times, then you set up a strategy for sampling the area,” he said. “You need to understand what kinds of habitats are out there and think about how to sample to get the best representation of the diversity that exists in the area. And of course there’s the matter of how to get to the habitats, who’s going to do the sampling, and how to get the samples back.”

All of that preparation takes place before the starting bell sounds. “Then once it’s kicked off and everybody starts sampling, there’s pretty much a fury of effort going on all over the place,” said Scholtens, who received his masters and doctoral degrees from U-M.

After observations have been made, samples have been collected, identified and photographed and data have been recorded, the teams—each concentrating on a specific group of organisms, such as vascular plants, algae, fungi, insects, non-insect invertebrates, birds, mammals, amphibians and reptiles—will generate lists of all the species they’ve found. Beginning at noon on the final day of the event, the public is invited to come see what the teams found. A formal presentation of findings will take place that afternoon.

Though UMBS classes and visiting scientists have conducted individual surveys of plant and animal life over the field station’s 98-year history, a multi-team mega-effort encompassing many groups of organisms offers unique opportunities.

“The data we collect will serve as a baseline for knowing what’s there,” Scholtens said. Incredible as it may seem, even though UMBS has been around for almost a century and has hosted many well-known scientists, “I still can’t provide you with a list of all the insects that occur there,” he said. “And I’m talking about a place where we have good knowledge of the flora and fauna. By comparison, our knowledge for many other areas in the country is pathetic.

“In conversations about biodiversity, most people would say we’d like to save the things we have,” Scholtens said. “Step one is knowing what you have, and that’s what we’re working on. Everyone thinks it’s only in far-off places like the Amazon that we need to worry about biodiversity, but we need to worry about biodiversity in our own back yards.”

In addition to underscoring the need for basic biodiversity data, Scholtens hopes the BioBlitz will call attention to the lack of scientists trained to collect such information.

“Ideally, we would try to cover all taxonomic groups in our survey, but that’s almost impossible now because there aren’t experts available.” That’s because fewer biologists are specializing in taxonomy—the science of describing, identifying, naming and classifying organisms—perhaps because of the perception that “we pretty much know what’s out there,” Scholtens said. “Events like BioBlitz show us just how wrong that perception is.”

. Wagner’s lectures, scheduled for 7:30 p.m. July 5 and July 6, are free and open to the public. On BioBlitz Demonstration Day ( July 8), the public is invited to view samples beginning at noon, and findings will be presented at 2:30 p.m. The fee for SEE-North’s program for 5th through 8th graders is $16 and includes lunch in the UMBS dining hall (to register, call or e-mail SEE-North at (231)348-9700 or [email protected]).

The U-M Biological Station, located on Douglas Lake, is a 10,000-acre field station dedicated to education and research in field biology and environmental science.

University of Michigan Biological Station