Last season we started a new survey in an attempt to gain an understanding of the biodiversity within various habitats of a polyculture garden/farm/landscape. During this post I’ll introduce the garden we carried out the surveys in, overview the habitat types within the garden that we looked at, I’ll present the survey protocol, share the results with you from the late Summer Survey and end with some discussion of the survey and results.
Why do we need to record biodiversity in the first place?
Our project mission is to develop and promote practices that can produce food and other resources for humans while enhancing biodiversity. To encourage biodiversity in our gardens, we include a variety of habitat into the landscape design, including native wild habitats (at various stages of succession) and cultivated habitats. The gardens are, essentially, a mosaic of habitat. Seeing as we are looking to enhance biodiversity within our gardens we must have the means to record the diversity withi…