Rob Stevenson ’69 sat in the Alvord Center for Global & Environmental Studies on April 17 with a view of the Meadows, the Cow Pond, and an expanse of biodiversity, soon to be documented as part of a campus-wide BioBlitz. 

Rob, an advocate for citizen science, was visiting for an evening of science, billed in part as an invitation to “slow down, look closely, and rediscover the world around us.” 

Students, faculty, and staff are getting that chance this week with a three-day BioBlitz, which, as the name suggests, is an intense period of biological surveying. The school’s first campus-wide BioBlitz kicked off on Tuesday, April 22, Earth Day. From April 22 to 25, all are invited to explore campus and document local biodiversity using iNaturalist, a free app that allows you to identify plants and animals. “Every observation helps build a database of species and supports real scientific research,” noted Marley Matlack, the director of the Alvord Center.  

As part of the CT River Schools Collaborative, Loomis joined Deerfield and Northfield Mount Hermon in this week’s BioBlitz effort. The Connecticut River runs 400 miles through New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, and Connecticut before reaching Long Island Sound. The river is, noted Marley, a natural resource that we must preserve and protect, so the three schools sometimes collaborate on events.     

A few hours before he was to talk with students and other members of the community in Gilchrist Auditorium on April 17, Rob practiced what he preaches. He took a few minutes to slow down for an interview, and each word out of his mouth showed his enthusiasm for the world that was just beyond the windows in the Alvord Center. 

“The most important thing about slowing down is it will allow us to see things we otherwise miss,” Rob said. “As you’re walking around normally, you're with people and you’re talking, so you are alert to what is going on socially. You're not alert to what is going on around you. An example that you might imagine is the bubble that forms, the noise bubble, and everything hears that and hides, but if you stop and wait 15 minutes, it all comes back and you become the background. Then you start to see things; you observe animals and then you start to notice other things. ... We have tremendous ability to see, but we don't use it for the natural world anymore. In the evolutionary sense, that was everything. You had to find your prey, your food, you had to look out for dangers, so your sensory systems are built to do that.” 

Walking with a friend and chatting — that, of course, is healthy. So, too, is walking fast, Rob said, but in that case, you’re focused on the exercise and not what you’re seeing. Sometimes, he said, we need to pause, walk in silence, and observe. 

Rob is an associate professor in the Biology Department at UMass Boston. Years ago, he said, he was “doing school-yard ecology teaching for some elementary school teachers, and one of the teachers asked me the name of plants growing in the cracks, and I couldn’t answer. That drove me to become more concerned about identification, so I worked a long time on how to identify things, and the upshot of that was I wanted to participate locally in my watershed association.” That is the Parker River Clean Water Association in Massachusetts, which seeks to protect the Parker River and its environment. That’s where, 25 years ago, he started practicing citizen science. He is a board member. 

“Citizen science,” Rob said, “is the idea that people without formal training can participate in a meaningful way in the scientific process.” 

That is a goal of the BioBlitz. A tool such as the iNaturalist app certainly makes it easier. As does a free app called Merlin Bird ID from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Each year citizen science plays out across the globe on what is called Global Big Day, a celebration of the birds around us. Last year, more than 63,000 people gathered observations. This year Global Big Day is May 10. The Merlin app helps identify birds from the sounds they are making. “That’s unbelievably cool,” Rob said. “I was told that would never work 20 years ago.”  

Birding, said Rob, is a “big tradition around the world now, and birding has become so organized through the use of apps. That community is driving the collection of biodiversity in scales unseen.”  

Now the Loomis community gets to document what is out there. Or, as it has been billed, “see Loomis through a whole new lens.”