Great first day!
Good morning AppState Team!
We're off to a great start for the Fall 2023 BioBlitz! UNC Wilmington took the lead yesterday with nearly a thousand observations already. We are currently just short of 500 so we'll have some catching up to do. You can find the leaderboard for the challenge here: 2023 Fall NC Campus Nature Challenge.
So where should you go and what should you look for on our second day? I have two suggestions based on previous years:
We have crescent-cup liverwort growing on the banks of Boone Creek running through Durham Park. It was observed during our previous two challenges and is a bit of an odd occurrence. Marie L. Hicks' field guide for the liverworts of NC describes it as an exotic liverwort native to the tropics and frequently found in greenhouses, where it is a common weed on soil in and on clay pots. There is a herbarium record for it that was collected at AppState in 1976 with the location given as "in flower pot in chemistry department." I wonder if its introduction to campus goes all the way back to that record. With observations in both fall and spring, it seems to be making it through our winters just fine. Can we find it again and confirm that we have an established population of it in Durham Park?
Another plant to be on the lookout for is mile-a-minute weed at the Greenway. This stuff is a nasty invasive and listed as a class B noxious weed in NC. There have been eradication efforts hand-pulling the plants as well as releasing a predatory weevil for biological control. Have those been successful or is it still out there and thriving? It was already spotted twice again yesterday! All observations of it would be helpful to those who are trying to combat the infestation in Boone. It would be fruiting at this time of year and if you can collect and trash/destroy the fruits if you find it, that would be helpful, too (don't leave them where birds can find them and spread the seeds).
Happy second day of exploring the biodiversity on our campus!
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