Ecostack Innovations organises a BioBlitz with the Isla community
On the 27th July, and as part of the EIT Food project ReCreate, Ecostack Innovations has organised a BioBlitz with the Isla Community.
What is a Bioblitz?
A BioBlitz is a celebration of biodiversity! It is an event that focuses on finding and identifying as many species as possible in a specific area over a short period of time.
In a BioBlitz, students, scientists and community members work together to explore the natural world. Participants join to observe and collect data about plant and animals found in a designated area and time frame. This process has become easier using smartphone applications that can help collect localised data about organisms, while assisting the user in identifying species.
Urban nature and placemaking at Isla
During this bioblitz, we have engaged with residents to carry out a rapid urban plant assessment in Misraħ Andrea Debono, while participants also learned about how to identify plants through the use of reference guide books and online help using smartphone applications.
Participants of all ages joined the BioBlitz, and had turns to collect and identify plant specimens, and then store the data online!
Finally, inspired by herbaria in natural history museums, our participants dried, pressed and mounted plant to prepare an attractive, easily displayed collection that will last a long time and which may be used by others to identify plant species in the future.
The BioBlitz is the first ReCreate project activity, and was carried out as part of the Nduru Dawra mal-Misraħ event, organised by Dawra Madwarna and Senglea Community Gardens with the support of Ecostack Innovations and the Senglea Local Council.
ReCreate is a Citizen Engagement project, funded under the EIT Community New European Bauhaus Initiative, to develop innovative and collaborative models of initiatives that increase citizen engagement and involve communities in the design of sustainable public spaces that address local challenges.
ReCreate builds upon the vision of a group of residents from the locality of Senglea, who are actively reimagining their hometown as a greener, more liveable space, using arts and gardening as their inspiration. The project aims to reconnect communities with nature through placemaking activities for children and residents. By embedding nature in placemaking we hope to contribute to achieving the sustainability challenge of halting biodiversity loss, increasing resilience, addressing inequalities in access to nature and improving aesthetics. Recreate is coordinated by Ecostack Innovations in collaboration with Senglea Local Council, Dawra Madwarna and the University of Malta.
Interested in learning more about our next BioBlitz or about our work on nature in cities? Get in touch with the team behind the ReCreate project from here.
EIT Community New European Bauhaus ReCreate is supported by the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT), a body of the European Union