The Community Web Mapping Portal

A fun and easy way to record wildlife sightings and conservation activities

The Community Web Mapping Portal is a fun and easy way for anyone to record and share wildlife observations and other conservation activities with others – and you don’t have to be a scientist or work for the government to use it!

The portal has been developed as part of the Victorian Connecting Country project led by the Friends of the Box- Ironbark Forest community group. Spatial Vision, the company that built the portal, has kindly agreed for the portal to be promoted and used by; Citizen’s Wildlife Corridors (CWC), Southern New England Landcare and the Armidale Tree Group and is also supporting a CWC lead funding bid to run a trial and assessment of the portal’s use.

The portal uses a Google Map format so you can navigate to your area using a plain map background (roads towns etc.), a satellite image or even a 3D Google Earth backdrop. There is also a quick link to our region by selecting ‘Southern New England’ centred on Armidale, or the larger ‘North East NSW’, from the drop- down list on the bottom left corner.

For those of you who enjoy spotting and identifying native animals and plants, whether you live on a property, in town or go on weekend picnics in the bush,

I would encourage you to register and add your sightings and conservation activities to the portal. By recording our observations we will start to build up a picture of all the amazing and unique plants and animals that inhabit or migrate through the New England Tablelands.

This presents another way for anyone to contribute to the conservation of our native species. Animal and plant surveys undertaken by ecologists are very expensive and tend to be mainly on public lands such as National Parks or along roads, few surveys are undertaken on private lands. For this reason we know less about the native plants and animals in these areas and your observations will help fill this gap. With the new threat of climate change scientists now believe that protecting and enhancing native habitats outside National Parks will be critically important for the survival of many species as they are forced to move and/or adapt to changing conditions.