While it’s a word of recent coinage, “bioblitz” has rapidly gained widespread currency among naturalists around the world.
The concept is a flexible one. But basically, a bioblitz is an intensive, time-limited survey of the biodiversity of a particular location. The time from may range from hours to weeks, and the location may be a single property, a complex of areas related by ownership or ecology, or even a town, county, or state.
Bioblitzes are generally open to the public. Indeed, part of their purpose is often outreach and education. But whatever specifics are involved, bioblitzes spice up the observation of nature with a spritz of challenge or competition. It’s an engaging combination: In the same way that birders have long motivated themselves by building year and life lists, bioblitzers test their skills and sometimes their stamina by trying to find, photograph, and identify as many species as possible.
While the relationship is not obligatory, most bioblitzes use the community science platform iNaturalist.org as their tool for collecting data. A vast, public database of natural history observations, iNaturalist (“iNat” to its enthusiasts) offers easy data entry from phones or computers, identification assistance from intelligence both human and artificial, and like any database, resources for sorting, selecting, and analyzing data.
Bioblitzing on Martha’s Vineyard dates back just over four years, to June 2022, when BiodiversityWorks and the Trustees teamed up to run the first bioblitz of Long Point Wildlife Refuge. The Long Point blitz has evolved into an annual tradition, with the fifth consecutive one held this past June. Island naturalists have also bioblitzed Correllus State Forest three times, with a fourth effort this month. One-off bioblitzes have been held on two Nature Conservancy properties, Hoft Farm Preserve and the Medicine Lots.
Bioblitzing remains something of a niche interest: Across the 10 Vineyard bioblitzes held before I wrote this, a total of just 46 observers had submitted iNat observations for at least one event. But some individual bioblitzes have generated prodigious amounts of information. The 2025 Correllus blitz, for example, documented 368 species with a total of 1,050 observations. Combined, Vineyard bioblitzes have contributed more than 6,700 iNat observations, and documented more than 1,300 species.
And as observers gain experience with the peculiar demands of bioblitzing, skills and productivity have improved. Active observers often enter more than 100 observations in a one-day blitz (I think I hold the record here, with 310 observations last year in Correllus). And with each event held, more and more observers break into double or triple digits in the observation and species categories.
All of this will take a new turn starting at 5 pm on July 24, when the first Inter-Island BioBlitz kicks off. Running for two weeks, until 5 pm on August 7, this event pits Nantucket (which has developed its own bioblitz traditions) against the Vineyard. Proposed by Sarah Bois, the science director at Nantucket’s Linda Loring Nature Foundation, this new event draws on the perpetual, generally good-natured rivalry between the islands to incentivize observers. The Vineyard simply cannot, in my humble opinion, allow That Other Island to win!
BiodiversityWorks will be running various public events, including moth nights and plant and insect outings, during this event. But the Inter-Island BioBlitz is open to anyone with a (free) iNaturalist account, and all iNat observations made on Martha’s Vineyard during the event will automatically be swept into the project that logs results. So anyone with a camera or cell phone can help put Nantucket in its place.
Fun competition aside, data from this event will also be useful. The simultaneous snapshots of biodiversity will reveal differences in the species mix and seasonality of these two similar-but-different islands.
Past iNaturalist data suggest that we can expect a thousand or so observations during two weeks in summer, even without the stimulus of a competition. And hundreds of common or widespread plants and animals can be guaranteed to turn up in our results. But victory (in both the total observations category and the number of species) will come from energetic individual outings during the event, and from experienced bioblitzers strategically deploying their effort.
A bioblitzer who surfcasts, for example, realizing that bluefish or striped bass are not slam-dunk species in an event like this, may make a point of photographing and iNatting a timely catch. Birders may simply leave the plants to others, and ramp up their time in the field with a camera and telephoto lens to seek species that others are unlikely to be able to document. And you can be sure that I will be targeting scores of obscure insect species that I happen to know reliable locations for.
To participate, no action is needed except entering Vineyard iNat observations made during the event. But the Martha’s Vineyard Atlas of Life website, at mval.biodiversityworksmv.org but also easily found by a web search, hosts a page devoted to the event, with information on the event, links to resources for using iNaturalist, and other ways to learn and participate.
This is bioblitzing made easy, and I hope that many of my readers rise to the challenge.