On the ground below, an unusual activity is taking place. People are lurking behind tree trunks, crawling on the forest floor, rigging branches with climbing ropes, and sweeping the shrubbery with nets. Their mission is to count and survey as many species as is humanly possible during a three-hour stint. The scene is a Biodiversity Blitz in the forest hammocks of Myakka River State Park, between Osprey and Arcadia. A BioBlitz is best defined as a rapid biological survey, designed to assess diversity in a specific site. One of the biggest challenges in current field biology is the slow methodology for classifying and counting species. Approximately 7,000 species are catalogued per year on Earth, but an estimated 98 million remain unclassified and undescribed. At this rate, extinction is outpacing science. New methods of rapid assessment are required, and the BioBlitz is one solution.
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