(Article by our guest write Francesca Figaroli, ESSET student)
Have you ever wondered, while walking to your campus all worried about how you will survive this semester, how many organisms are minding their own business right next to you?
Well, I sometimes did because I find the animal and plant kingdom extraordinary. But how many different species are there and which are their characteristics, in other words is it possible to build a database of the biodiversity around us?
Yes it is! This is exactly the aim of Observation.org which also has a page only dedicated to the observations in the Netherlands called Waarneming.nl.
Here you can find all the species collected till now in the area of interest, photos uploaded by users, and the classification of them as either common, relatively common, rare or very rare.
Everyone can contribute to this database by downloading the app “ObsIdentify”, creating an account, taking pictures of the species and the app will recognise it and add it to the collection.
To gain more users the platform Observation.org, together with other organizations and institutes such as universities and schools, launched the idea of BioBlitzes. This is a defined period of time where different groups can compete in order to “collect” as many species as possible.
I attended the Bioblitz that took place from the 22 of May till the 22 of June as part of Avans University of Applied Sciences competing with all other Universities of the Netherlands.
Together with a classmate I collected species of plants and insects in the Lovensdijkstraat Campus in Breda, in the Avans Campus in Den Bosch and in the Stappegoor Campus in Tilburg. It was really interesting because I had little knowledge about the scientific names of even the most common plants and animals and the app helped me with that because it instantly tells you which species you are looking at.
Since the three locations were at about 30 kilometres of distance from each other I was expecting to find the same species everywhere. But I wasn’t prepared for was the number of different species in the relatively small green areas, also considering that the campuses are all in city areas. In total I registered 87 species, most of them plants and 37 of these just in Breda!
And it was in Breda that I captured the beautiful Platycnemis Pennipes also known as Blue Featherleg or Damselfly which is a relatively common native species. The folkloristic tradition in the North of Europe tends to associate this insect to the idea of elegance and gentleness, indeed in the Scandinavian Culture it was associated with Freya, pagan goddess of love [1]. From this tradition different names derived, for instance in Denmark it’s called “Juffer” which translated means “Little Miss” and in Dutch “Waterjuffertje” which translate into “Watermaiden”.
(Not the original photo from Francesca, but from Wikidepia, attributed to M. Betley)
(Part of the BioBlitz research area – our Lovensdijkstraat campus in Breda)
Leave a Reply