Our biodiversity is important here at Organic Blooms. As certified organic growers we are exceedingly careful in the stewardship of the environment under our care. We use no synthetic chemical inputs and we manage areas of our site to provide habitat and food for wildlife. However we have not previously done regular species counts or wildlife surveys so we had an unclear picture of what our biodiversity really looks like.

Recently supervisor Steve and one of our trainees, Chris Teague, who is our resident wildlife expert and an outstanding wildlife photographer, have started working to map out the species we encounter on site. Together they set up an account for Organic Blooms on the brilliant iNaturalist website/app on which species sightings are recorded globally. Chris has spent several weekends recording his wildlife sightings at Organic Blooms from the last few years including plants, mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and invertebrates.

To date Chris has recorded almost 300 sightings (and counting!), illustrating them with his stunning photos taken on site, a tiny selection of which you can see here. This is helping us to build a much clearer picture of the species we have here at Organic Blooms. This will give us an excellent basis for identifying ways in which we can improve the habitats and food sources for wildlife and what we can do to support more locally native species to thrive. We hope this picture of our biodiversity might encourage others to set up their own iNaturalist accounts and start recording sightings too. Steve and Chris are now doing a weekly observation of species across our nine-acre site to capture new sightings.

Please take a look at our iNaturalist profile, perhaps over a cuppa when you have 10 minutes to spare. It is already impressive and the majority of Chris’s listings have already been verified by ecologist users of iNaturalist, meaning that they can be drawn on for research purposes by scientists around the world including ecologists, zoologists, climate change experts and more. Go to www.inaturalist.org choose ‘explore’ and enter our postcode into the ‘location’ box: BS37 9TS. You can then select between ‘map’, ‘grid’ and ‘list’ views; selecting ‘map’ view gives you a visual snapshot of the extent of the recordings on our site (drag the box out a little to make sure it encompasses our entire site).

We’re excited to see how our biodiversity picture develops going forward!