Volunteers are on a mission to survey all the beetle species found on SERC’s Edgewater campus in Maryland. You’d think we know everything there is to know about beetles, but we don’t! There are roughly 400,000 described beetle species on Earth. Scientists estimate there could be over a million more still to be discovered.
Since 2018, volunteers have been going out every year using a variety of methods to find beetles, estimate their abundance, and better understand their role in the ecosystem. This data will enable researchers to study the changes in the SERC’s beetle community over time, assess the overall ecological health of different parts of SERC’s campus, and be able to use it as a baseline or comparison to other places.