Measuring Biodiversity On Our Farm
Biodiversity, or the number of species observed within a particular ecosystem, is an important indicator of the environmental impact of farming practices. If left undisturbed, our farmland will eventually return to a dense forest that a rich diversity of plants, insects, fungi, and animals all call home. This state may be the best environmental outcome, but it limits the amount of food that we’re able to produce. Our challenge as farmers is to do the least harm. The goal is to produce as much nutritious food as possible, without adversely impacting the biodiversity of our farm’s ecosystem.
To hold ourselves accountable to this goal, we’re starting a biodiversity study on the farm. Inspired by the good folks at Hawthorne Valley Farm, we’ve created a project on iNaturalist that allows anyone who visits the farm to upload photos of species they encounter. We’ve always thought of the farm as an “agricultural park” and have welcomed folks to the farm during daylight hours, every day of the year. This biodiversity study will allow our community to engage in our farming practices in a new way, by participating in the study of our farm’s ecosystem.
How does it work?
The study is hosted on a platform called iNaturalist, an open-source initiative by the California Academy of Sciences and the National Geographic Society. After you’ve created an account on their website or mobile app (available on iOS and Android), you may upload photos of any species that you observe on the farm. Our biodiversity study will automatically collect any observations that are geolocated within the farm’s boundaries. When uploading, you have the option to identify the species in your photograph (with help from suggestions provided by the iNaturalist platform) or you may leave the species unidentified, if you aren’t sure. You may also help identify species observed by other community members.
Download the app, head out for a walk along our farm trails, and become a citizen scientist!
How will we measure success?
The collection of species observed on the farm prior to and during 2022 will act as our biodiversity baseline. We will then compare the number of species observed in each subsequent year with this baseline, and overtime as we accumulate multiple years worth of data. As we continue to adjust our farming practices, we hope to see the number of observed species increase. We also anticipate opportunities to carry out follow-up studies into specific populations as we learn more about which species call our farm home.
What has been contributed already?
It was so exciting to see that many iNaturalist observations have already been submitted on our farm. We configured the biodiversity study to include all previous observations. At the time of writing this, 98 species have been observed on the farm: 44 plants, 26 insects, 21 birds, 3 fungi, one arachnid, one mollusk, one mammal (a cottontail rabbit), and one reptile (a snapping turtle). Many of these have been submitted by the group of birders that regularly walk the farm trails. The first “observation of the month” goes out to David Chernack for capturing a beautiful photograph of a Great Blue Heron (Ardea herodias) perched on our silo.
Photo credit: David Chernack