This fall students from USM's Environmental Science and Policy are studying relationships between plant diversity and fungal diversity as part of an ecosystems ecology course. You'll see organisms from 4 habitats in this fall's observations: mixed evergreen forest, mixed deciduous forest, shrub wetland, and a lawn beneath mature red oaks.

A quick look at the bioblitz data shows more species / observations near the edge of the USM campus, and fewer further into the forest (N, NW of the campus). This pattern is not representative of the situation on the ground, but rather reflects the way in which we did our search. Each participant started 35 meters apart at the edge of campus, then walked 120 meters into the forest on a transect perpendicular to the stream, stopping every 10 meters to identify all organisms within 2 meters of that point. Observations were only entered into iNaturalist when the organism was first observed; when an organisms was observed further along the transect it was only noted as "observed" on our datasheets. We did this to avoid overwhelming iNaturalist with what might appear as duplicate observations, and to reduce the amount of time (and cell phone battery power) needed to complete the survey.

Well done everyone - on Sept 9th we made over 254 observations and identified over 129 species, all with a few more observations yet to be entered. Keep entering new observations as we dig deeper into the forest (in some cases, literally) this fall.

Remember to take multiple photos of your subject. This will help with identification and provide a more complete record of the organism.

Plants: flowers, seed (pods), leaf, leaf arrangement, bark, growth form (whole plant)
Animals: different angles, body parts