The Barnes Arboretum held the first annual SJU BioBlitz on Oct. 2 to catalogue the biodiversity and organisms on the grounds of the arboretum. 

53 observers walked the grounds of the Arboretum for five hours, recording plants using iNaturalist, an app that helps to identify plants and animals.

Clint Springer, Ph.D. associate professor and director of the Institute for Environmental Stewardship and director of the Barnes Arboretum, organized the event with John Braverman, S.J. Ph.D., associate professor and director of environmental and sustainability studies. 

Springer said the BioBlitz was an opportunity to collect information and to record the biodiversity, the number of organisms, on the Barnes Arboretum grounds. Springer said this was especially important, since the world is in a biodiversity crisis.

“This was an opportunity to really get people out, but also to make them understand that this is now part of our campus, and that they should use it,” Springer said. ”There’s so much beauty and serenity here.”

Deborah Duong ’24, a student in Springer’s Organismic Biology class, said she walked around the grounds of the Barnes Arboretum to do the BioBlitz so that she could categorize untagged plants and get to know more about the organisms living there. 

“The idea of taking pictures of plants is not something you normally do, usually [people take] a picture of maybe a big tree or flowers, but now we have pictures of ferns and stuff like that,” Duong said.

Springer said they used this day to bring out the St. Joe’s community to enjoy the outdoors and to learn about the biodiversity that campus has to offer. 

“We wanted to draw attention to the beautiful arboretum that we have to enjoy,” Springer said. “We are really interested in cataloging the biodiversity [and] the number of organisms that are on our campus as the world finds itself in a biodiversity crisis.”

All volunteers used the iNaturalist app to catalog and gather information on what they observed at the Barnes Arboretum.

“[The app] is free to use and you can collect data on observations that you make every day,” Springer said. “People catalog what they see all over the world.” 

Students, like Kevin Vu ’24 who had never been to the Barnes Arboretum, were able to use this experience to connect with the environment and learn more about the nature that surrounds St. Joe’s campus for the first time. 

“I’m just observing the different types of plants we see here,” Vu said. “The environment [at the arboretum] is so beautiful, it’s something that we don’t really see around the main campus that often,” Vu said. 

Springer said he plans to host this event again in the spring and summer so that seasonal changes can be documented.

“This is a good way for us to know what’s here, and then we can do this periodically and see how it’s changed,” Springer said.“It’s also just to get people connected with nature.”