 Biodiversity, or biological diversity, is the variety and abundance of all living things on Earth and in specific locations. Biodiversity is a major contributor to an ecosystem's health. Biodiversity is absolutely essential to human survival on the planet. A change in or loss of biodiversity due to climate change could be devastating to human society. Climate change and global warming are significant factors in the loss of biodiversity. According to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, quote, Biodiversity provides a large number of goods and services that sustain our lives. The loss of biodiversity often reduces the productivity of ecosystems, thereby shrinking nature's basket of goods and services from which we constantly draw. Let's look at an example. An ecosystem, like the one in the Sandia Mountains, is made up of several groups of organisms, or taxa. This includes plants and trees, bugs, birds, reptiles, and mammals. Each taxa depends on the survival of the others, creating an interconnected web. If one taxon is lost, the ecosystem may survive. But if more taxa are lost, the ecosystem could collapse. Small steps taken by everyday citizens through outreach activities help keep the importance of biodiversity alive. One such outreach program is BioBlitz. BioBlitz is a 24-hour inventory of all living organisms in an area. Its success depends on the involvement of both professional scientists and citizen scientists, working to establish real data about biodiversity. For the past few years, BioBlitz in Alpkirche has been held at the Rio Grande Nature Center. In 2012, BioBlitz moved to the Sandia Mountain Natural History Center. Let's hear from an expert. I'm Rosie Norlander, and we are at the Sandia Mountain Natural History Center, which is an environmental education facility. The main purpose of BioBlitz is to sort of get a 24-hour snapshot of the biodiversity of the area, get an idea for what we have out here at any given time. And another main component is citizen science and involving the public in science, giving them an opportunity to get out in the field, working with real scientists, learning about what they do, and sort of the importance of biodiversity in a given area. We like to get the public involved in science because I think there's sort of an idea that science is only for scientists. One of our goals with BioBlitz this year was to get people out exploring, making their own discoveries, even if it's not anything new to the area, but making a discovery for themselves and realizing that they can be scientists. You know, the more people are invested in an area, spend time in an area, really feel a connection, sort of harbors a sense of stewardship and responsibility, which is important just in order to protect the environment, to protect biodiversity. So we really just wanted to be able to get people out and give them an opportunity to meet scientists who normally aren't necessarily so accessible to every day, you know, everybody. BioBlitz not only helps communicate the importance of biodiversity to the public, it also gets local communities involved in the ecology of their own backyards. Citizen science reminds everyday people that every species, no matter how small, have important roles to play in preserving the health of the earth for all of us.