students have participated in the realization of a ‘minibioblitz’, consisting of identifying as many plant and animal species as possible for a period of time
Half a hundred second students of the ESO and first of Baccalaureate have known the ‘Framework’ project for the recovery of biodiversity through the management of vegetable roofs carried out by Artemisan Foundation with the Society of Hunters of Aguilar de la Frontera and the Andalusian federation of Hunting.
during a field day, the students of the IES Vicente Núñez, divided into seven groups, have participated in a ‘minibioblitz’, an activity that consists in identifying the largest possible number of plant and animal species in a specific space during a certain period of time.
The first stop of the visit has been carried out in an olive grove with traditional intensive management, where the vegetation cover of the entire surface had been removed, except in some points below the olive trees. In this space, students identified between 10 and 21 species per group.
On the other hand, the second stop took place in the southern part of the El Madroño estate, in which a management of the plant cover between streets is carried out, some from natural vegetation, and others with reinforcement of the seed bank carried out in the Framework project in January 2021 and that is still maintained at some points. In this second area between 25 and 55 species per group were identified.
Framework Project
The difference between the observed species demonstrates that the maintenance of the vegetation cover in the olive grove encourages the recovery of biodiversity, one of the objectives of the 2020 Framework project, which brings together eleven pilot studies throughout Europe that seek to develop a new method of agriculture sensitive to biodiversity.
For the development of the ‘Minibioblitz’, the participants used the ‘Obstidify’ application, a platform for collecting observations on international biodiversity and contributed their data to the ‘Inaturalist’ application, a citizen science project based on the mapping and exchange of biodiversity data worldwide.
Before the field departure, an explanatory talk was carried out in the educational center and in the coming weeks a last day will take place to see and assess the results of the inventory performed and publicize the differences observed between intensive agriculture and the system of vegetable covers that favors biodiversity.
