The 2016 BioBlitz of National Parks in celebration of the U.S. National Park Service Centennial sparked BioBlitz events at hundreds of park units, with results captured online in the iNaturalist database. In addition to engaging the public in nature and science, the 2016 BioBlitz of national parks created new opportunities to evaluate potential contributions of citizen science to information needs about park biodiversity. Capturing biodiversity through inventories of species is notoriously difficult for a myriad of reasons, and maintaining and comparing biological inventories can be hampered by species naming systems, classification, and taxonomy. Further, land use and climate change stressors may be leading to accelerated biodiversity changes.
Each park folder includes the following:
- All research-grade citizen science data
- Table One: an entire list of research grade species found during the 2016 Centennial BioBlitz, with indications of whether they match the existing NPSpecies list for the park
- Table Two: a table indicating synonymous taxonomy that iNaturalist uses for species found in the ITIS database that match the park's NPSpecies list
- Table Three: a table with research Grade observations from the park that were not found in the NPSpecies database, were not due to a change in taxonomy from ITIS and were not found in the first synonym entry in the NPSpecies database
- Table Four: a table of organisms not included in NPSpecies by taxon catagory
- .RMD Report File: a R markdown file that aggregates all of the tables and presents interesting findings about each park.