On a hot day in September, a horde of Macaulay Honors College students descended upon the New York Botanical Gardens in the Bronx for BioBlitz. BioBlitz was a 24-hour program in which groups of college students explored the gardens and collected data. We were given t-shirts and a clipboard and told to document the organisms we found.
I was in the group that documented plants so we headed into the forest and started trying to identify plants. The leader of our group, a man named Steve, was a botanist and was a real plant enthusiast, like, the biggest plant enthusiast in the world. He got really excited anytime a member of the group spotted any nightshade since nightshade was his specialty. I didn’t know there were so many types of nightshade until I met Steve. He also showed us some cool plants; like a tree where you could eat a twig and it tasted like wintergreen, or a plant with spikes that could sting you. This guy really knew his plants and loved every single one, so his enthusiasm was contagious. However, it wasn’t contagious enough for us to get any real data.
To collect data, our group wandered about 1,000 feet into the Native Forest part of the Botanical Gardens. We looked at whatever plants were next to the path that we thought looked interesting. Then, with the help of our handy pant identifying handbooks, we figured out what species each plant was. However, this proved problematic when most of us had no idea how to use these books. Most of the time, we resorted to asking Steve or just using Google. Needless to say, it was a very haphazard way of collecting data. Any scientist would roll his eyes at the horrible inaccurate data we took. I’m not sure how other groups did, but I know our group’s data was a very unreliable source of what was actually in the gardens.
Only so much can go well when you ask a bunch of untrained college students to complete a task, and BioBlitz was no exception. It was a lot of fun to watch people be stung by these plants, but it wasn’t a reliable source of data. After completing our project and realizing there was no correlation between edible plants and birds because of inconclusive data, we realized just how ridiculous it is to base an experiment on data that we know wasn’t collected properly. This was really what BioBlitz taught me. Your experiment is only as good as the data you collect. I hope in future years that some changes are made to BioBlitz in order to collect better, more expansive data. This is really the only way we, as future scientists, can truly trust in our experiment.
