PEOPLE congregated from all corners of the State to explore the Walpole wilderness and document the weird and wonderful species hiding in their own backyard over the first weekend of October.
Organised by the Walpole-Nornalup National Park Association, more than 160 people participated in the project, searching the tingle and jarrah forests and wetlands to record species.
The group used the iNaturalist app to document the wildlife, which was a convenient and harm-free way of recording species, according to Walpole-Nornalup National Park Association event co-ordinator David Edmonds.
"Everybody, just with their smartphone, can take a photo of whatever they see, put it on there and experts will come along and identify it," Mr Edmonds said.
"So that's the method that we're using, because it's less invasive, then you're not damaging the bush or picking flowers or anything like that."
From the weekend, more than 2000 photos have been uploaded to the platform already and more than 400 different species of plants and wildlife have been identified.
Mr Edmonds said this was a huge effort and he was extremely excited by the result.
"If you were to go out on a regular day, you would be happy with 50 species, so 400 is huge," he said.
"I think there's about 2000 plant species recorded for the whole Walpole wilderness area and we were just in one tiny area.
"So you're sort of looking at, you know, representing nearly a quarter of the diversity."
This is the second year the Walpole BioBlitz has been run by the association, as an attempt to record the Walpole wilderness - which cover more than 365,000 hectares.
"Amazingly, we still don't know a lot about it," Mr Edmonds said.
"We don't know where a lot of the different ecosystems occur.
"We don't even know what sort of plants and animals are in all of those ecosystems - so this way we can catalogue that information and use it for improving management."
The Valley of the Giants forest, at Walpole, is only found within a 20 kilometres radius of Walpole and nowhere else in the world.
This is heightened by climate change, as many of the insects only survive in a cool and damp environment - so as time goes on the area these animals can live in will shrink.
"So you're finding bugs, things such as spiders, scorpions, pseudoscorpions, that are found nowhere else in Western Australia anymore," Mr Edmonds said.
"And we know with climate change it's getting drier and drier in a short period.
"So these ecosystems are at risk from a drying climate."
Mr Edmonds said the BioBlitz by cataloguing these insects, they "know that they're there" and then can look at ways to better manage the area in the future.
"It'll ensure that they're still there in the future because, unfortunately, the area that they can occupy will become smaller as it dries out."
About two thirds of the participants were from the Perth and Peel region and there were experts from a variety of different institutions, such as Murdoch University, The University of Western Australia, Edith Cowan University and the Museum of WA.
"It was a great opportunity to see and learn about stuff that you probably haven't seen before, by having all these experts that you can work alongside and learn from," Mr Edmonds said.
"But I think it's an opportunity for people to do something proactive in their own backyard, to actually try to do something to help to mitigate the effects of climate change."
Mr Edmonds said it was an opportunity to discover something "really different" that was off "the tourist map".
"They're not places that you would necessarily find by yourself, oftentimes you drive past something and don't realise that if you just walk 20 or 30 metres, you'll find this really unusual ecosystem."
Mr Edmonds hopes to make the Walpole BioBlitz an annual event and said people who are keen should keep their eye on their website for the 'mini blitz' they are planning to do throughout the year.
More information: Go to walpolewilderness.org
