Thank you! - Maryland Biodiversity Project and Giving Tuesday
Bill Hubick
We’re especially excited about the project’s focus on targeted data collection. We’re not just curating and archiving community data, but actively working to address critical gaps in our knowledge. MBP and our partners led the third year of the Turkey Point Bird Count and the second year of the Dans Rock Bird Count. Lead counters Aaron Reb (Turkey Point), Josh Heiser (Dans Rock), and a team of outstanding alternate counters collected invaluable migration data. We also worked with the Maryland DNR NHP and other stakeholders to target high priority summer insect surveys. Aaron monitored endangered King’s Hairstreak and Frosted Elfin butterfly populations, searched for some of the Eastern Shore’s rarest dragonflies and damselflies, and surveyed for globally rare and highly localized firefly species. Our first three seasons of bird count data were also published in the peer-reviewed Maryland Birdlife.
Our major BioBlitz of the year was held at New Germany State Park and Savage River State Forest in Garrett County. The team documented over 1,000 species during the event, including multiple new species for the project. The team also led a variety of field trips around the state, collaborated with state and regional conservation efforts, and joined conversations at the continental level about the value of all-taxa biodiversity inventories and community science.
On the technical side, the MBP development team is stronger than ever with awesome support from Jacqueline Palacios and now our new team members Linda Zhang and Kai Russell. We’re making rapid progress on the mobile-friendly upgrade of the website. We updated the site infrastructure for speed and stability. We’ll soon reach over one million records archived!
Will you help us make 2024 even more amazing? With your help, we’re ready to keep doing more good for regional biodiversity each year. We’re excited to keep growing this amazing project and community together. Thank you!
https://www.marylandbiodiversity.com/donate
- Bill, Jim, John, and the rest of the MBP team
