Results from the Acadia National Park 2014 Bioblitz

Chandler, Donald

From introduction: "On the beautiful weekend of July 18-21 around 70 'blitzers' participated in the third bioblitz that targeted beetles of Acadia National Park. After the round of introductory and organizational talks on Friday evening at the Schoodic Education and Research Center, the '24 hour' period of intensive collecting began Saturday morning. Saturday was devoted to Mt. Desert Island, where five ecologically different areas were targeted by groups of 'beetlers': Bass Harbor, Canon Brook, Duck Brook, Great Meadow, and Western Mountain areas. On Sunday was a period of free-form collecting on the Schoodic Peninsula in the morning, and the gathering of the various traps (pit-falls, flight intercept, Lindgren funnel, and baited malaise traps) ran through the afternoon. During this period and Monday morning, voucher specimens were mounted, labeled and sorted/identified to species where possible. Ten boxes of specimens returned with the lead scientist, UNH coleopterist Don Chandler, so that the more challenging material could be identified at a leisurely pace. Parts of this material was subsequently farmed out for visitors to UNH (Jonas Insinga), or those at other institutions to identify (Bob Nelson, Colby College; Ales Smetana, Serge LaPlante, Pat Bouchard, Ed Jendek, Canadian National Collection of Insects, Ottawa). As the specimens were identified, the data were entered into a database that captured the 'who, what, when, and where?' of documented presence of species at the targeted areas."