Nature conservation initiative "BioBlitz Belasitsa 2025" united citizens and institutions

The nature conservation initiative "BioBlitz Belasitsa 2025" was held in the Belasitsa mountain region from May 17-25, 2025. The event was organized by the Regional Inspectorate of Environment and Water (RIEW) - Blagoevgrad, on the initiative of the Ministry of Environment and Water, as part of the celebration of the European Natura 2000 Day on May 21. The initiative was implemented in response to the call of the Directorate-General for Environment of the European Commission, in partnership with the Observation.org platform - an international platform for recording observations of wild animals, plants and fungi.

The goal of "BioBlitz Belasitsa 2025" was to encourage citizens to discover, photograph and share observations of biodiversity in the protected area BG0000167 "Belasitsa", designated under the Habitats Directive and falling within the territorial scope of RIEW - Blagoevgrad. Participants searched for and documented as many plant and animal species as possible in specific areas of Belasitsa, with the most records being along the trails to the "Belasitsa" and "Kongur" huts, near the "Leshnitski" waterfall, along the Health Trail, along the road to the former "Paprentitsa" border post, and towards the "Halkata" area, all of which are near Petrich. There are also records from routes in other parts of the mountain.

The initiative involved representatives of RIEW - Blagoevgrad, the Natura 2000 Network Management Department, as well as many students from the "Young Mountaineer" Association, the "Anton Popov" Secondary School, and the Vocational High School of Electronics and Electrotechnics "Asen Zlatarov" - Petrich. There were also numerous individual participations by nature enthusiasts. Despite the active mobilization, unfavorable weather conditions prevented the participation of some of the schools that had previously registered.

The collected information is registered on the Observation.org website, which uses automatic species recognition based on photographic material. After the initial entry, an expert team verifies the reliability of the data. At the moment, the automatic system reports 153 observed species, 332 observations from 15 observers. The final results are yet to be summarized after verification by the platform's team.

The "BioBlitz Belasitsa 2025" initiative is another step in the efforts to raise public awareness and participation in the conservation of biodiversity within the European Natura 2000 ecological network.