Parks for Pollinators is NRPA's national campaign focused on raising public awareness of the current pollinator crisis by encouraging local action and positioning parks as a national leader in advancing pollinator health, native habitat and sustainability practices. This campaign continues to assess the public’s understanding of pollinators, to outline actions to protect them and to increase local park and recreation agencies’ capacity to promote pollinator protection within parks and to engage and educate their communities on what they can do to help.
What’s a BioBlitz?
The Parks for Pollinators BioBlitz is an event where community members work with park staff to create a snapshot of the variety of wildlife that can be found in local parks. To participate, community members will use an app to take pictures of plants, insects and animals to see what wildlife is present in the park on the day of the event and provide the park system with more information about local pollinators, which are essential to our ecosystem.
During our sixth annual Parks for Pollinators BioBlitz in September 2024, more than 200 individuals pledged to help pollinators and learn how to host a BioBlitz. Events were organized from coast to coast, with 35 states, from Arizona to New York. These groups recorded almost 45,000 observations, documenting thousands of species of both pollinators and pollinator-supporting plants. Nearly 5,000 people participated in the national BioBlitz to record these findings using iNaturalist. You can — you can even see what pollinators were found near you on our
Parks for Pollinators BioBlitz
Join us to raise awareness of pollinators nationwide by hosting a Parks for Pollinator BioBlitz in your community during the month of September. In September 2025, NRPA will be hosting the seventh annual Parks for Pollinators BioBlitz. Sign up now!
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What's Happening to Pollinators?
Pollinators are essential to our ecosystem. Over 75 percent of the world's flowering plants and 35 percent of the world's crops rely on pollinators. Did you know that one out of every three bites of food you eat is there because of pollinators? They not only are essential for our food production but also support healthy ecosystems.
Communities should have special places to support pollinators. But many people don’t know how they can help, although they would if they could learn how.
Pollinator species have declined in numbers, become endangered or even gone extinct due to the loss of natural food supplies and habitat. Their recovery can occur through the creation and restoration of native habitats across the country in public spaces along with educating communities on how they can help. Parks, as pillars in their community, are vital in creating this change. Join us in supporting pollinators nationwide and do your part to help!
Multiple Benefits of Pollinator Habitat
Did you know that pollinator habitat and native plants do much more than support pollinators? Pollinators and their habitats:
- Increase ecological resilience of communities
- Increase sustainability practices in parks
- Improve water quality by filtering stormwater and runoff
- Reduce the heat island effect
- Are low maintenance and water-efficient
- Provide many more wonderful benefits
Parks for Pollinators Support
Your parks can support pollinators by making your best effort to:
- Plant a variety of pollinator-friendly flowers that bloom from spring through fall and grow as many native plants as possible (especially milkweed).
- Avoid using insecticides and herbicides, which may kill pollinators or the plants they rely on. We will try an integrated pest management (IPM) or the organic land management (OLM) approach.
- Educate our community on steps they take to help pollinators.
- Create or update a pollinator protection and sustainability strategy for our agency or community.
Resources
Parks and Pollinators: Taking Action and Advancing Sustainability resource helps agency’s leverage their current efforts with native habitat and create plans that more effectively advance their work with native habitat and sustainability efforts. This resource offers a guided self-assessment, process to create a team, curated resources, sample policies and practices, and ways to engage your community and building awareness. These tools can create momentum for your current sustainability and biodiversity efforts and create a core team to advance this work in the future.
BioBlitz toolkit: This toolkit will help you plan, execute and evaluate your BioBlitz! It contains everything you need to set up your event through iNaturalist and even provides extra complimentary activities too.
Parks Play a Vital Role in Saving Pollinators: This information provides national research on the public’s support of pollinator issues and their knowledge of how they can help.
"Columbus Recreation and Parks Department Celebrates Earth Month": In this NRPA Open Space blog post, learn how the department celebrates Earth Month 2021 by planting pollinator habitats.
“Becoming “Green Stewards”: How the BioBlitz Is Getting Residents Across the South Invested in Their Parks”: This blog explores how two different park agencies are leveraging the Bioblitz to increase community engagement.
Reciproci-TEA: City of Pflugerville's First BioBlitz This blog looks at how City of Pflugerville, Texas, in partnership with the Monarch Sanctuary PRoject, hosted its first BioBlitz to promote pollinator education and conservation, complete with a well-attended educational workshop teaching participants how they could save native pollinators in their own backyards.
Contact the NRPA Resilience team with any questions.
