These students and other volunteers are in the midst of a bioblitz, a concentrated effort to find and inventory as much of the plants and wildlife as possible over a two-day run.
"It’s about 345 acres with a high diversity of ecosystems," ESF visiting instructor Dr. Witney Lash Marshall said. "There are some old agricultural sites. There’s forest and there’s wetlands and ponds with a really nice diversity of trails with good topography."
"We found four different salamander species, a newt, we found a snake species, two kinds of frogs and while we were doing that throughout the course of the day we also ran into other random things like a really cool slime mold which is a kind of a fungus," said Robin Trumble, ESF conservation biology student.
The bioblitz is part of an overall project to help the town manage the Skaneateles Conservation Area.
"We have 11 groups in the class that are working (on it), there’s a group working on invasive species management and designing best management practices for removal and trying to stop the spread," Dr. Lash Marshall said. "We’ve successfully set up a summer internship for several biology students who are going to go out and help map where the invasives are and start some of the eradication work.
"But other things we’ve worked out are bringing in native wildflowers and trying to bring back some native bird species by introducing some feeding plant feeding species that are native to the area, providing more habitat and food structure for native species," said Amanda Robinson, ESF conservation biology student.