ANNOUNCER: This program is made by MPT to enrich the diverse communities throughout our state and is made possible by the generous support of our members.

Thank you.

NARRATOR: Coming up... Meet Marylanders working to track the state's diversity of life... JIM: How do we know what we're losing if we don't know what we have?

NARRATOR: Next.

Outdoors Maryland is produced in cooperation with the Maryland Department of Natural Resources.

(upbeat music) NARRATOR: A mission in miniature... A call from the canopy... (bird calling) An unfurling geometry... Each movement, sound and subtle variation its own unique thread in the complex tapestry of Maryland life.

Revealing its richness to those who look and listen deeply.

And on a cool June morning, volunteers gather at New Germany State Park in Garrett County to do just that.

JOHN HALL: We want a large number of species, go look for what you're interested in and we'll be sure to review the observations whenever you get them uploaded.

NARRATOR: Today, naturalists John Hall... JOHN: So it's pretty good, a little bit weedy.

NARRATOR: And Jim Brighton... JIM BRIGHTON: I've botanized the roadside quite a bit.

NARRATOR: From the Maryland Biodiversity Project, are overseeing a Bioblitz, or rapidfire biological inventory of the area.

JIM: Right here, there's a powerline cut.

JIM: Every year we try to do a big BioBlitz and that's basically we gather a bunch of people to one area to survey that area as thoroughly as possible.

NARRATOR: Armed with cameras and maps, participants scatter throughout the park to photograph as many species as possible.

JIM: We're in a hemlock dominated woods, intermingled with some cherry trees and oaks and maples, And what we're doing is I'm trying to find big enough fallen logs that we can roll to see what we can find underneath of them, and hopefully you know, get a big salamander or something like that.

I have the collector gene, which means from an early age, I like to make lists.

When I realized that birders keep a life list and things like that, that drew me right in.

But it moved from birds to plants to butterflies, and now I keep lists of all the things I see.

NARRATOR: After realizing that his home state lacked its own comprehensive species list, Jim co-founded the Maryland Biodiversity Project in 2012.

It started with a single photo.

JIM: Now we have many thousands of people contributing, over 750,000 photos.

NARRATOR: Down by the water, one duo identifies "graminoids".

BOTANIST: Grass like plants, so grasses, sedges and rushes.

NARRATOR: While blitzer Deborah Barber searches for strange growths... called galls.

DEBORAH BARBER: A gall is a formation made by the insect hijacking the DNA of the plant, to make a shelter for its young.

DEBORAH: I love them because they make me slow down and look really, really closely.

DEBORAH: Yeah!

NARRATOR: And across the lake, entomologist Tim Foard peers into the microscopic world of water mites.

TIM FOARD: They're brightly colored, they're beautiful creatures.

We don't know how many species there are in the state because there's just very little work being done.

NARRATOR: Tim has long been drawn to life's less flashy forms.

TIM: This is a Aphaenogaster picea, the Aphaenogasters are important in dispersing seeds of some of the native wildflowers.

NARRATOR: In 2005, he initiated a statewide ant survey, documenting more than 130 unique species across Maryland.

TIM: They don't receive a lot of attention.

You know, they're not charismatic organisms like butterflies and dragonflies, but they are important because they are part of the local fauna.

Just the fact that it exists, it's important enough.

We don't really need to ask why we need to do this.

Because it's there, you know, and it really deserves to, you know, to exist as well.

NARRATOR: Tim's photos, like all those taken this weekend, will serve as lasting records within the Maryland Biodiversity Project database, snapshots of what exists here, now.

JIM: This is the most important thing to get out of this.

How do we know what we're losing if we don't know what we have?

♪♪ NARRATOR: According to Maryland's Department of Natural Resources, more than 1,250 plant and animal species have been designated state rare, threatened or endangered.

[frog barks] Over the centuries, nearly 100 have vanished from the state altogether.

From elk and bison in the 1700s, to grey wolves and heath hens in the 1800s, to many more recent losses.

Some still found elsewhere.

Others, likely globally extinct, local casualties in what many experts call a worldwide extinction crisis, driven by centuries of human impacts on the landscape.

TIARA THOMAS: Last weekend we had a pretty bad storm come through, and after every storm we see this collection of trash come back, damaging the ecosystem.

NARRATOR: Tiara Thomas is the Managing Deputy Director of the Accokeek Foundation at Piscataway Park in Prince George's County.

NARRATOR: A National Park Service property, it houses the National Colonial Farm, a living history museum, And was created to preserve the view from Mount Vernon across the Potomac river.

NARRATOR: But Tiara also knows this place by another name: Moyaone.

TIARA: So I am Piscataway Conoy.

We are eastern woodlands people.

And so, our homelands stretched from southern Maryland all the way up until about the Patapsco River area.

NARRATOR: With Moyaone, situated here, it's historic capital.

TIARA: The word "Moyaone" in Algonquin means that everything is here.

We would have had shad, of course, the mussels, deer, otter, beaver, you would have had turkeys, and then you have the aquatic vegetation, fresh water marsh plants.

Everything you need to be a surviving community and thriving community is in this place.

So we're currently in our ethnobotanical garden.

This used to be our museum garden and we're redoing this space to kind of represent what a normal eastern woodlands would have looked like.

TIARA: The Piscataway people look at everything as a relation to them.

We don't see a separation between us and the land, we don't see a separation between us and the plants.

We looked at everything as a life source, and not a resource.

NARRATOR: But with the arrival of British settlers came a different perspective.

KAYLIN BEACH: So this is our tobacco field and it is representative of a very small version of tobacco that would be grown here in the 18th century, but if you can imagine a field like this times 15, 20, imagine the space you would have to clear.

NARRATOR: Educator Kaylin Beach has led countless tours of the National Colonial Farm, which exhibits the life of a middle-class farm family and enslaved person in the 1700s.

KAYLIN: Colonists came in with an idea of 'How can I take back to England the goods and the things that I'm making, how do I make money?'

So they would grow larger quantities of a single plant and they wouldn't mix other things in because that took away from the productivity of that single plant in their minds.

KAYLIN: To visitors coming to a barn like this, they see a plant hanging on a stick.

But to someone living in the 18th century as a colonist who had been growing this tobacco as a cash crop, this is money.

TIARA: Tobacco to us is a sacred plant, it's a plant that was not mass produced, it would have been small crops.

But it became something that was a resource, not a life source.

NARRATOR: Over time, large-scale production of tobacco and other cash crops transformed Maryland's landscapes, as did rapid population growth.

Biodiverse forests, clear cut to make room for sprawling single-crop fields, while roads and developments carved the remaining habitat into smaller, disconnected patches.

NARRATOR: Pollution, overhunting, and overfishing further strained ecosystems, pressures today amplified by the accelerating impacts of climate change.

KAYLIN: Looking at the biodiversity that's here today, it is representative of all of the different peoples, who have come into this landscape, and stewarded over time the space, or used the space over time.

RISHARDA HARLEY: This is called Round Leaf Bittersweet, comes from... China, I don't remember exactly when it was introduced.

It pretty much suffocates trees, if you look at this one.

NARRATOR: In the park's woods, Stewardship Director Risharda Harley leads a small crew of volunteers in mitigating another major threat to local biodiversity: invasive species.

RISHARDA: There's English ivy here on that tree if you want to get that one Linda.

With our non-native invasive plants, they tend to take over an area and when that happens, they become a monoculture of just that plant.

Let's say that plant is not good for certain bugs to eat, well then those bugs are going to leave and go to wherever, you know, their food source is.

Well if those bugs leave, the birds are going to leave to go to where those bugs went.

The simplest way to think about it is the food chain that you learned about way back in elementary school, but it's actually a food web with so many organisms depending one on each other.

NARRATOR: Invasives, whether plants, insects or fish, disrupt that balance.

NARRATOR: In actively tending to the forest... RISHARDA: All of the vines, you're gonna make a cut at the bottom, and then you're gonna make a cut higher up.

NARRATOR: Risharda takes her cues from indigenous stewardship practices.

RISHARDA: A lot of areas across the planet that have high levels of biodiversity are places where humans have historically, over time, managed those areas for certain things.

When you reduce the amount of non-native invasive plants, and also encourage your native plants, you're welcoming those bugs, you're welcoming those birds, you're welcoming amphibians and other things that depend on those native plants, back to an area.

The only consequence is, you increase biodiversity.

♪♪ NARRATOR: Back at the Bioblitz, Jim sets up, under a darkening sky, for the event's grand finale.

JIM: We're putting up the sheet, I'm tying it up here, and we're going to put a mercury vapor light on a tripod that's gonna shine the light on the sheet and hopefully the light will draw in all kinds of really cool nocturnal insects.

Good healthy ecosystems equal lots of numbers of moths.

The more plant diversity you have, the more moth species you're going to have.

MAN: Clepsis Melobucanis.

JIM: And there's a lot of plant diversity in New Germany State Park, so you have a lot of species.

NARRATOR: Most nights find these cryptic creatures flitting from flower to flower, feeding on nectar, but tonight, the ghostly glow of UV radiation draws them in, while the blitzers do the flitting.

JIM: It's fun.

Everybody travels from sheet to sheet to sheet documenting all the species.

So it's 10:45 and it's actually pretty spectacular.

Big silk moths and a lot of the micro moths, and not just moths but flies, beetles and all different kinds of stuff.

NARRATOR: Over the course of the evening, more than 200 insect species visit the sheets.

Several of them, brand new additions to the Maryland Biodiversity Project's database.

JIM: We'll probably be here until 3 or 4 'o clock in the morning.

NARRATOR: The weekend's efforts, night and day, yield upwards of one thousand documented species, about half of them insects.

Not surprising, given that insects make up about 80 percent of all known animal species globally.

And scientists estimate that there are millions more insect species still unknown.

[camera shutter] A fact which underscores the difficulty of tracking and quantifying biodiversity.

Similar mysteries lurk in the waters of the world, but newer technologies promise to shed light on at least some of these unknowns.

On a gray September morning, marine ecologist Matt Ogburn and his team load gear into boats at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Anne Arundel County.

MATT OGBURN: Today we're headed out to the South River to do some monitoring on restored oyster reefs there.

The bottom of the bay mostly is sand and mud, but historically there were extensive oyster reefs.

NARRATOR: Overharvesting, disease and pollution have depleted Chesapeake oyster populations to less than one percent of their historic peak.

But restoration efforts are underway.

A few months ago, the Oyster Recovery Partnership, a local non-profit, deployed spat on shell, or baby oysters set on recycled shells, onto a no-harvest sanctuary site in the South River.

MATT: What makes this restoration special is that we've set it up to really do research.

[water splashes] MATT: We'll be scuba diving to see how the oysters are doing.

NARRATOR: The divers use a square called a quadrant to collect oysters from a set area on the bottom, and bring them in bags to the surface.

Where they'll be counted and measured.

DIVER: Alright, Oyster, 32.

NARRATOR: Along with any hitchhikers.

MATT: When oyster reefs were lost in places like the South River here, we also lost all the different crabs and fish and other things that lived on those reefs and depended on them.

And we're here to study how the oysters grow and develop, but also to see how that biodiversity of the reef develops and comes back when the oyster reef comes back.

NARRATOR: But physical counts only capture what's visible.

MATT: Well this device is called a Niskin bottle, but it's basically just a way to, to sample the water from the bottom.

MATT: We send down a weight, it causes the two endcaps to close.

ROB: There we go.

ROB: It may just look like a bag of water, but contained in that is DNA that was shed by the various organisms that live in and around the reef, so fish, crabs, shrimp, worms and lots of smaller organisms.

ROB: So we will take this back to the lab and sequence all the environmental DNA within these samples.

NARRATOR: At the Smithsonian Natural History Museum in DC, scientists Chris Meyer and Sarah Tweedt process and sequence samples of environmental DNA, or eDNA, from all over the world.

SARAH TWEEDT: What I'm doing here is I have a filter attached to some tubing.

This is basically going to pull the water through the filter and capture all the microbes, cells, gunk, that has DNA inside.

SARAH: Most of the biodiversity in the world is hidden, well we call that cryptic.

eDNA is exciting because you get a list of species you might not be able to see with your naked eye.

SARAH: It's also easy to take a water sample.

CHRIS: We don't have to use nets that stress out creatures.

All these animals are shedding DNA like the dust in your house, it's the dust of species, and with these new sequencing technologies, we now have the capacity to read that dust.

NARRATOR: Once extracted, the DNA is amplified through a process called PCR, which generates millions of copies of each sequence, similar to how a COVID test works.

A DNA sequencer then generates a profile.

CHRIS: Within a drop of water from a filter we can record over a thousand species.

And basically, it's just long strings of As, Gs, Cs and Ts in a row.

NARRATOR: Matching these sequences to the correct species requires collecting a library of reference specimens.

CHRIS: This is our holding place where different collections have come in from the field.

Right here, for instance, there's a whole tray of material that was collected from the Chesapeake.

It's mostly crabs.

We've been taking a very small piece of tissue.

And we'll sequence actually the license plate of this species.

So we're processing thousands to tens of thousands of specimens every month, and 20 to 40 percent are new records to the database for comparative purposes.

NARRATOR: Meaning that some of the mysteries hidden in these frozen eDNA samples, these tiny biodiversity time capsules, may yet be unlocked.

NARRATOR: Beyond the obvious culprits, pollution, development, climate change, human activity also impacts biodiversity by disrupting natural processes.

GABE CAHALAN: The burn unit goes straight from the end of this road along that dotted yellow line.

NARRATOR: And on a warm May morning, the Maryland/DC Chapter of the Nature Conservancy has gathered a crew in Dorchester County, at a unique wetland called a "Delmarva Bay", to re-introduce one such process, fire.

[crackling of fire] Gabe Cahalan, the chapter's burn boss, kicks off today's controlled burn with a small test run.

GABE: So, you can see it's going out on its own in the shade in some spots, that's not good.

It may mean that we just need to wait a little bit.

NARRATOR: But before long, he declares conditions adequate, and the crew gets to work, lighting the wooded perimeter that surrounds the wetland.

NARRATOR: Deborah Landau is the chapter's Director of Ecological Management.

DEBORAH: This is our Dorchester Pond preserve and it's a seasonally filled wetland.

So historically, this pond would have burned every three or four or five years and the fires that swept across this landscape would have kept it open.

NARRATOR: By preventing trees from encroaching.

NARRATOR: But roads, acting as firebreaks, along with decades of fire suppression, driven by concerns about safety and property damage, have disrupted this cycle.

DEBORAH: Over time, if we weren't burning this area, the trees will become established and they'll take up more and more water as they get bigger, and eventually the Delmarva Bay will disappear.

With climate change, we're going to have longer periods of extreme weather, we'll have longer drought.

By bringing back the natural processes such as fire, we're making these landscapes more resilient into the future.

So it's an hour or so post burn and everything looks really, really good.

And I love to see how shriveled the sweet gum are, they're all crispy and burnt up.

NARRATOR: Come July, the encroaching trees are still shriveled and burnt, but the grasses have resprouted, along with a variety of unique plants: tiny carnivorous sundews and state endangered carolina redroot and yellow eyed grass.

Bird species also benefit.

GABE: A lot of bird species require different forest types at different points in their life.

By using prescribed fire across the landscape, we can create those different conditions rather than having all just homogeneous forest types.

NARRATOR: At the Nature Conservancy's Nassawango Creek Preserve in Worcester County, Gabe is checking on an array of small green boxes strapped to trees.

[ripping of velcro] GABE: This is recording equipment, it's called an audio moth.

NARRATOR: Since 2018, he's been studying the natural soundscapes of this unique pine savannah, defined by its open canopy and rich diversity of groundcover plants.

GABE: Our controlled burn program here started in 2007.

Since that time we have maintained an open forest habitat here with prescribed burns.

NARRATOR: Supporting fire adapted species from pond pines, with cones that release seeds only after exposure to intense heat.

To insect-eating pitcher plants, which depend on fire to maintain open, sunny conditions.

And of course plenty of birds... Prairie warblers, brown-headed nuthatch, red-headed woodpeckers.

GABE: Red headed woodpeckers nest in dead trees, what we call snags.

NARRATOR: A hallmark of burned landscapes.

GABE: It is one of the only woodpeckers that will hunt insects on the wing, so while it's flying, and they need an open space to be able to actually catch the insects.

NARRATOR: Like many fire-adapted species, their populations have declined sharply in recent decades.

GABE: The question that we're asking is how well our management prescribed fire primarily, is providing the habitat type that a lot of declining species need.

Here I've got a set of 12 recorders out.

I usually put down at least 300 meters apart, so that we're not capturing the same birds.

And I'll leave this up for anywhere from 10 to 14 days.

NARRATOR: It's the early morning hours that offer some of the richest data on bird activity and diversity.

GABE: The birds wake up very early as the sun's coming up and they're singing all at once, and we call that the dawn chorus.

So it's a good time to come out and record birds or watch birds.

[birds chirping] So this is from May 20, 2022, right around 5:30 or sunrise, and so this is the dawn chorus.

NARRATOR: Represented in waveform.

GABE: So we've got some chickadees, chipping sparrow, and a woodpecker in the background there.

NARRATOR: Software helps Gabe translate this symphony of song into a list of species.

GABE: So over the past five years of recordings we've found that the species that we're specifically thinking about, that really like this open forest habitat or pine savannah, are doing really well in the areas where we've been doing prescribed fire.

NARRATOR: Further testament to how technology is helping scientists uncover and share the stories of Maryland's diverse inhabitants.

But perhaps our greatest tool in preserving local biodiversity is the collective passion of those who truly cherish it.

TIARA: We're all a part of the same life cycle and everything that we do affects something else.

JIM: It is our responsibility to make sure that our children and our children's children have the opportunity to sit here, hear the Louisiana water thrush, hear the pounding of the pileated woodpecker, hear the wind blowing through the yellow birch.

This is beautiful.

If we don't protect this, then what's left?

♪♪ NARRATOR: To stream episodes of Outdoors Maryland , visit mpt.org and don't forget to follow us on social media.

(owl hoots) Learn more about Maryland's diverse natural resources at dnr.maryland.gov, or download the official mobile app.

♪ ♪