The new website

Regular visitors will have noticed that the website has been substantially updated. While most of the old content is still here, it has been restructured and new features such as a photo gallery and field meeting reports have been added. We have also taken the opportunity to update the Records to Refind list and the Hieracium list, both of which are available on the Recording page. Updates of other documents will be available in the near future.

One obvious change to the website at the moment is the absence of the Sussex map and the tetrad lists. This is only a temporary measure. The size of our database has increased hugely during recording for the new Flora, which has made updating the old map very time-consuming, and now that phase is over the need for comparative lists has become less necessary. A functioning version of the map page will be available on the new site, but the data underlying the map and tetrad lists will not be updated (at least not as frequently as before).

Also now that Flora recording is over, we would like to encourage members to record everything in a tetrad, rather than just new or missing species, otherwise our data will rapidly become obsolete. For example, everyone recorded Bellis perennis at the start of Flora recording in the early 2000s, but because we asked you to only send in new species in the last few years, many tetrads don’t have a record for B. perennis that is under 10 years old!

Finally, there is now a SBRS Facebook group, which you are encouraged to join. You will need to have a Facebook account, but it should be a useful forum for anyone interested in the wild plants of Sussex. And once you have a Facebook account you can discover some of the other interesting plant-related forums on Facebook.

Huge thanks to Roy Wells for all his work on the website up to now, and I look forward to looking after it over the coming years.