News
*NEW*Irish Spring Conference goes online!
We held the first ever online Irish Spring Conference on Saturday 27th March. For more details of this very successful and enjoyable event see Irish Conferences.
*NEW*County Annual Reports for 2020
Every year we ask Recorders to summarise the most interesting and exciting news from their Counties in less than 250 words. Here is a collation of their 2020 Annual Reports. Take a look - it is a great read! Individual County reports will also appear on County pages (see below).
Irish Grasslands Project - New Annex I Resources!
As part of this year's Irish Grasslands Project we've created a series of free, downloadable resources around the four Annex I grassland habitats which occur in Ireland: Lowland Hay Meadows, Molinia Meadows, Nardus Uplands, and Semi-Natural Calcareous Grasslands. Each resource contains a description of the habitat, list of characteristic species, and descriptions and photos of 10 plant species which are good indicators for the habitat. We hope these will be useful to anyone interested in learning more about these important habitats or wanting to be able to identify them in the field.
If you'd like the check them out, visit the Irish Grasslands Project webpage. On the page you'll also find videos and slides from the five webinars we ran this summer.
Big thanks to the authors, everyone who provided images, Maria Long for support and feedback, and NPWS and CEDaR for funding the project!
Irish Autumn Meeting and AGM
This year's Autumn meeting and AGM took place on Saturday, 26 September. It was held fully online for the first time due to restrictions around Covid-19, but was still a great event. The meeting included a welcome from BSBI President Lynne Farrell and four talks covering Atlas 2020 and other botanical projects, followed by the formal AGM and election of new members to the Committee for Ireland.
Details about the meeting, including videos of the talks, are available on Autumn Meeting and AGM webpage.
Aquatic Plant Project
Continuing the Aquatic Plant Project which started last year, we are offering
online training with aquatic plant expert Nick Stewart to help people build their aquatic ID skills and hopefully inspire a bit more aquatic recording this autumn!
There were two webinars, which are now available to view on the webpage:
- Introduction to Aquatic Plant Identification
- Stonewort Identification
We also held an interactive online Aquatic Plant Identification Workshop, where Nick identified specimens live using a camera and digital microscope to show key features, and participants were able to ask questions throughout. We hope to offer more of these online workshops in the future! Thanks to NPWS for funding this project.