Helllloo! My name is Adrienne Zhou and I am currently double majoring in Health and Nutrition Science and Sociology. I hope to become a nutritionist, and later social activist in third-world countries. I’d also like to go to culinary school in France and be trained as a chef of French cuisine. I’d also love to be a sushi chef.

I expect to learn a lot about science and the less-structured ways we, as denizens of a great city with many cultural and scientific public resources, learn about science. Knowing and understanding the subject of science would make me more well-rounded, and therefore more capable of understanding different perspectives. It would also made me a more informed nutritionist.

For the Bioblitz event, I studied lichen, which are tiny organisms that are a combination of fungus and algae,  in Central Park. My group and I searched for, identified, and counted lichen on trees and rocks. Lichen are a little known part of the food chain; they are a source of food for animals like moose and deer; some animals eat as much as 7kg of lichen for a meal! Lichen have also been disappearing because of air pollution, so the absence of lichen are a sign of heavily polluted air, which affects the quality of life of all living things and the environment.

The volunteer who lead my group was very knowledgable about many things; she does research for the Botanical Garden and was especially knowledgable on the subject of lichen. There were so many different kinds of lichen and she was able to identify all the little organisms, which all looked the same to me, which was very impressive and says a lot about her dedication to lichen studies. She participated in Bioblitz as part of her research for the Botanical Garden and also because she was interested in the opportunity to study life forms in Central Park.

This activity makes us as New York citizens more aware of the environment and nature that the city was built on, which, one would hope, makes us more conscious of the choices we make and the consequences they have on the environment.

The Bioblitz event was a really great opportunity to see Central Park from a different perspective. I go to the park to sit on the grass and read, or to people watch, or to bike or explore and connect with the greenery set in the middle of concrete jungles and enormous skyscrapers.
What I used to consider moss on the tree, I found out, was actually lichen! That made me think about the trees in my neighborhood and how I was so close to lichen for all of my life and didn’t even know they existed. I didn’t like that all the lichen looked the same to me; I studied the different kinds we encountered and tried to differentiate them, but wasn’t very good at it, but I would love to partake in another activity like this!