An invitation to our Community from the UCLN President, John Walter!

Hello everyone,

Seasonal greetings and best wishes to you all on behalf of the UCLN team. I hope you all manage to have a somewhat normal Christmas celebration with your families after this rather extraordinary year.

The UCLN has been successful in establishing a Research Partnership Agreement with Dr Mark Hall and Western Sydney University and we are working behind the scenes to put things into place so our on ground pollinator surveys can commence in January 2021.

Mark will work with us in the next couple of weeks to identify some primary pollinator corridors across our landscape and we will jointly survey specific sites within the landscape for pollinator species and numbers over 2021. The resulting survey data will become baseline data for pollinators in the district, and we will monitor changes in both diversity and numbers over coming decades.

We are now urgently looking for expressions of interest from all local Landcare members who would be interested and willing to have surveys occur on their property.

We are seeking farmland, gardens, bushland and native grassland, riparian zones and in fact all landforms and land use types. We also want some sites that will be open to have supplementary plantings added over time and some that will not – to act as control sites. You do not have to become actively involved in the surveys if you offer part of your property as a survey site, but you would be most welcome to do so.

The actual size of a survey site will most likely be fairly small. Remember, this project also includes the towns of our region and some survey sites may be a park or a garden within a town.

We may not be able to initially cover all sites offered within our survey program – but please do not hold back on offering as we intend this to become a growing and long term process. While our initial focus will be on “primary corridors”, we see the future landscape being more akin to a river delta system with a fine network of corridors fanning out across the entire landscape.

Don’t be shy! Send us your suggestions or give Bek or myself a call so we can discuss things more fully with you.

A quick response is the most important thing here so we can make our final survey site selections and get our surveys underway while the pollinators are still active in January.

Please send your suggestions to our hard working Facilitator, Bek, at ucln@uppercampaspelandcare.org.au and also cc it to me at john.walter2@bigpond.com

If you want to discuss this call Bek on 0432 491 789 or myself on 0410 598 252.

Kind regards to all

John Walter – President UCLN