Date: June 5 & 6
Location: URI East Farm & Kington Wildlife Research Station (and GSO Beach)
This year’s RI BioBlitz is a home game for the Rhode Island Natural History Survey! We’re going to bioblitz the 86 acres of URI’s East Farm campus, plus the abutting 84-acre Kingston Wildlife Research Station.
To keep the marine teams engaged, we will also bioblitz the beach at URI’s Narragansett Bay Campus. This is a hidden gem with lots of interesting marine communities and even some rare beach plants.
Registration opens SOON. Watch this space or sign up for enews to get the word.
The Kingston Wildlife Research Station is owned by Audubon Society of Rhode Island and operated in cooperation with the University of Rhode Island’s Department of Natural Resources Science. It is one of the longest-running banding stations in the country.
East Farm has been a site of agricultural research since the early 20th century when it was a center of blueberry and apple horticulture and chicken research.
Both properties are former farm fields with older second growth wet woodlands. There are rough fields, orchards and ornamental horticulture plantings, small woodland pools, streams, and swamps. Invasives are a non-trivial component of the landscape but the disturbance history also provides a diversity of microhabitats.