Abbey 1000 BioBlitz

Bury Water Meadows Group (BWMG) will be hosting a BioBlitz on Saturday 21st May 2022 as part of Abbey 1000 – a series of events celebrating 1,000 years since the founding of St. Edmund’s Abbey.

‘Bio’ means ‘life’ and ‘Blitz’ means ‘to do something quickly and intensively’. Together they make ‘BioBlitz’, a collaborative race against the clock to discover as many species of plants, animals and fungi (the bio-diversity of life) as possible in a defined time and space.

Suffolk has a valuable assortment of both expert and amateur naturalists who feed in their plant and animal finds (known as biological records) to data collection agencies such as the Suffolk Biodiversity Information Service (SBIS), iRecord and mobile phone apps.  BWMG volunteers fall into the second category, also termed ‘citizen scientists’. A staggering 4.8 million species records (nationally) are available, to inform everything from planning decisions and political policy to scientific research, education and practical wildlife conservation.  Amateur naturalists and their records are increasingly important in the race to find out as much as we can about our natural world so that we can tackle the dual crises of climate change and biodiversity loss and prevent further extinctions.

Wildlife recording can be a fascinating and rewarding activity. It’s all too easy for records collected on a spreadsheet to be forgotten and left on your computer or in a notebook, but by joining a BioBlitz, it makes your recording efforts much more fun as well as worthwhile and valuable.

So with your help, BWMG are looking to build on the existing knowledge of the species that visit or live in the Abbey Precinct.  We encourage you to stop at the BioBlitz hub in the Abbey Gardens, where you can meet the experts and organisers, show them your finds – generally photographic ones! and log them in.  You can watch demos of aquatic life in our rivers, discover the creatures which live in the soil and ask your nature questions.

Many of the events planned on the Saturday are bookable but all are FREE.

You will be able to do so via the Eventbrite booking system eventbrite.co.uk/e/abbey-1000-bioblitz-tickets .  or contact us at info@burywatermeadowsgroup.org.uk