Our effort has got off to a good start with 156 hours spent on weed control, between for July to September, 30% more than the average for the previous 14 seasons of monitoring.

Many of the weeds that haven't troubled us during the last few wet years are keeping us busy. Those weeds that relish the dry conditions (second driest July to September in our 15 years of monitored weed control) and the resulting reduced competition from other species. including Saffron thistles and Paterson's curse.

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Two of the presentations can be downloaded along with "Minutes" containing detailed descriptions of all presentations

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Some major changes have been uploaded to the fotpin website today to:

• upgrade it to the current html standards
• make it responsive to different screen sizes
• add improved navigation features
• update the content of some pages and relocate older, rarely used ones to an archive section
• add new content
  

What's new?

• vastly expanded flora and fauna section with improved navigation between species groupings and a large increase in the number of photos to nearly 300 (all taken on The Pinnacle Nature Reserve)
• a new history section, summarising what we know about the European occupation of the land that is now The Pinnacle Nature Reserve from
• coming soon, a collection of suggested walks that will be linked to QR codes on our new signs
• replacement of our old site search function with Google site search, free and ad-free thanks to Google for non-profits
• "news headlines" now pop up in the middle of any page upon clicking the news icon and allow both a succinct list of headlines as well as being able to view more details without opening a new page
• frequent use of ▼/▲ allowing headings of sections on a page to be visible on opening without having to scroll down to see them, especially important for small screens
• other changes to the "look and feel"

Of the over 450 html pages on the site, just over 100 have been fully upgraded. All of the others have been integrated into the site but with the old, non-responsive html standards.

The upgraded and non-upgraded pages share a common menu and are fully interoperable.

The 290 pages that comprise our weed control effort records for the last 15 seasons represent the bulk of the pages that have not been upgraded because (a) the sheer amount of effort involved, (b) their design is not readily adaptable to be response to page size and (c) most users of these pages do so on a large screen. Many of the other pages will be gradually upgraded, depending on their frequency of use, as time permits .

This is a major update implementing a lot of new code and while it is compliant with the standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Some work is still needed to future-proof the code for when some current standards will be phased out. Unfortunately not all browsers comply with the W3C standards, but the major changes to the website have been tested with the 5 most commonly used ones. That said there may well be some problems of my making so please report anything that doesn't seem to be working properly, broken links, etc to me at webmaster@fotpin.org.au.
But hopefully you enjoy the improvements.

Warren Bond

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The weeding effort for the 2023-24 season 869 hours, 98% within the Reserve. The small amount of effort outside the Reserve was aimed at creating buffer zones around the boundaries. This was 13% less than last season and 2% less than the average for the previous 13 seasons of monitoring. If Weetangera paddock is excluded from calculations(because it has received a disproportionate amount effort compared with the rest of the Reserve for the past 5 years) effort for the rest of the Reserve was 24% less than the average for the previous 13 seasons.

Most effort (303 h; 36% of total) was spent in this period on the group of uncategorised low to medium risk broadleaf weeds largely in Weetangera paddock. This was followed at a distance by St. John's Wort (166 h, 19%), miscellaneous Woody weeds excluding Briars and Blackberries (91 h, 11%), Paterson's curse (78 h, 9%) largely in Kama Link paddock, and Thistles other than Saffron thistles (58 h, 7%). All other weeds combined accounted for 20% of effort.

See the weeding effort page and associated links to maps and charts for more statistics and comparisons with previous seasons and across the different management regions of the Reserve.

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The 1,000^th native species was confirmed today. Although this was a plant (our 269^th) a rush of new insect species (at 450 the largest grouping of species we have) in the last couple of months was responsible for bringing the tally close to this milestone total.

See the one page Pinnacle Native Species Numbers for a breakdown of these 1000 species and/or go to our flora & fauna pages to explore what all those species are and see photographs taken on the reserve of some of them.

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