How many species can you catalogue in just one day? Hundreds!
How many species can you catalogue in four months? THOUSANDS
The results of our survey of the rare Charitable Research Reserve have now been published in the Biodiversity Data Journal. View the article HERE.
One of the most striking aspects of the sampling that was undertaken at the rare Charitable Research Reserve was the speed with which it was collected, sorted, identified, and released to the public. Four months of continuous sampling plus one day of concentrated bioblitz-ing recovered around 3,500 species and more than 1,000 new species records for the reserve itself. Directly identifying all species sampled using traditional morphological methods, even with the best identification keys and experts on hand (which is unlikely given the dearth of expert taxonomists, especially in Canada), would take orders of magnitude more time to complete.
Another exciting aspect of our survey is that all of the data collected is now publically available. Sequences have been submitted to GenBank, data can be viewed on GBIF (hosted by Canadensys), and all records have been included as supplementary material in the published article. All specimens collected have now been deposited at the Biodiversity Institute of Ontario and are available for morphological examination.
Data
Explore the data on Canadensys here.
View the dataset on BOLD. Let us know if you would like to borrow any specimens! Note that you need to be logged into BOLD to load the dataset.
Visit the article to view a neighbour-joining tree and associated image library of representatives from each BIN collected.
Media
View the press release from the University of Guelph here.