The School Malaise Trap Program has provided the Centre for Biodiversity Genomics at the University of Guelph with the unique opportunity to actively engage and inspire youth across North America to become familiar with local biodiversity and the importance of environmental stewardship. Since its inception in 2013, the School Malaise Trap Program has reached over 300 schools, approximately 15,000 students and has collected and sorted nearly 322,000 insect specimens which were caught in the schoolyards of the participating classes.

Much more impressive still are the scientific findings associated with the School Malaise Trap Program. So far, the School Malaise Trap Program team has sequenced over 85,000 arthropod specimens representing over 8,000 individual species! Additionally, over 1,200 of the individual species collected were new to the Barcode of Life Data Systems. This means that we were able to assign DNA barcodes and reference data to these species so that they can be easily identified and accessed by experts from around the world.

Please click on the program to view the results:

Program	SPRING 2013	FALL 2013	SPRING 2014	FALL 2014	SPRING 2015	FALL 2015	Total
Participating Schools (total includes schools which have participated more than once)	60	18	54	58	63	54	307
Participating Classrooms	77	22	93	92	80	81	445
Participating Students (comparison site reach not included)	2,003	659	2,258	2,479	2,302	2,375	12,058
Comparison Sites (total includes sites which have participated more than once)	7	3	4	1	5	10	30
Total Organisms	95,500	28,110	27,965	61,052	61,776	47,711	322,114
DNA Barcodes	19,501	4,736	12,502	13,846	15,199	15,034	80,818
Species (total does not include species overlap between programs)	1,392	1,493	704	3,402	2,968	3,515	8,119
New to BOLD	276	113	20	324	308	247	1,288

 For individual school reports, click here.

Dataset Codes

Spring 2014 | Fall 2014 | Spring 2015 | Fall 2015 | Fall 2016