Learning at Landcare - Citizen Science and The Good, The Bad ,The Ugly

From the Awabakal seasonal calendar, we’re now entering Wunal, the hot time on Awabakal Country. Days are humid, nights are warm, mosquitoes are biting, and many animals are breeding and active. Afternoon storms often sweep in with lightning and heavy rain, though in some years Wunal brings dry heat and drought instead.

Australia, including Awabakal Country, moves to the rhythm of El Niño and La Niña, global climate cycles that shape whether Wunal brings rain or dryness. Climate change now adds further complexity, with hot weather sometimes arriving earlier or lasting longer. Toward the end of Wunal, as koyiwon (rain) increases, the weather begins moyiyakowa, cooling again.

This awareness of seasonal change reminds us that Country is constantly shifting and that caring for land means observing its patterns closely.

Learning through Citizen Science

In September, Landcare members learned about the iNaturalist citizen-science platform. We’ve since launched a Coal Point project, where locals can log sightings of plants and animals. These observations build a record of the area’s biodiversity and changes over time, valuable data for the community and researchers alike. 

One of our most exciting finds came from a bundle of decaying weeds, a blackish blind snake (Anilios nigrescens). These fascinating, non-venomous snakes spend most of their lives underground, eating ants, termites and their larvae. With their smooth scales, small dark eyes and tapering snout, they look a bit like shiny earthworms. They “taste” the air with their tongue to follow insect trails and use their upper jaw to rake prey into their mouth.

Blind snakes are part of the intricate food web of our bushland, preyed upon by owls, feral cats and foxes. Keep an eye out, though you’ll more likely find signs of them than the snakes themselves.

The Good: Spring in Full Bloom

Coal Point has been showing off a spectacular spring. Gardens are glowing, pollinators are busy, and the bushland is full of life and colour. Our native plants have put on a dazzling display, providing food and shelter for birds, insects and small creatures.

A heartfelt thanks to everyone contributing to this beauty, our Landcare volunteers, hall users, citizen scientists and those simply caring for their patch of land. You all help keep the peninsula flourishing.

One local plant to watch for over summer is Bursaria spinosa, known variously as Whitethorn, Blackthorn, Sweet Bursaria or Christmas Bush, and by the Dharawal names geapga and kurwan. This hardy, prickly shrub provides safe nesting spots for small birds. Its mid-summer flowers are creamy and sweetly scented, attracting butterflies and many other insects. Later, they form coppery, purse-shaped seed pods, hence the Latin name Bursaria (purse) spinosa (spiny). It’s a great native for gardens, growing 3–4 metres tall in sun or light shade with moderate drainage. A light prune keeps it bushy.

You’ll see Bursaria flourishing in West Ridge and Stansfield reserves, two of many local bushland pockets lovingly tended by our volunteers.

The Bad: Spanish Moss on the Move

Another plant catching our attention is Spanish Moss (Tillandsia usneoides), also known as Old Man’s Beard. While pretty hanging from trees, this air plant can smother and damage its hosts in humid conditions. Without roots, it grows in long, silvery chains that can block sunlight and weigh down branches until they snap.

Spanish Moss has been spotted growing wild on Coal Point. You can help track its spread by recording sightings on iNaturalist under the project Tracking Spanish Moss in Australia.

When recording, note the distance from cultivated sources, host species (if known), urban or bushland location and the number of clumps.

If you love Spanish Moss in your garden, please keep it contained. If you find it in bushland, record it, then carefully remove and bin it. Let’s stop this escapee before it shades out and smothers our native trees.

The Ugly: Bagged but Not Beautiful

Finally, a plea from the Threlkeld Reserve team. During a recent Landcare morning, volunteers found four plastic bags of dog poo dumped in the bush. These weren’t the compostable kind, just ordinary plastic, left behind.

Please, if you’re walking your dog, use the compostable green Council bags and dispose of them in the green-waste bin. Our volunteers already give their time to look after the land, let’s not detract from their joy. Most dog owners do the right thing. Be one of them.

Learning from the Land

As Wunal’s warmth builds, Coal Point continues to hum with life, birds calling, cicadas buzzing and the scent of native flowers in the air. Each season brings lessons about resilience and renewal, and Landcare is one way we learn from Country while giving back.

Whether you’re a regular Thursday morning Landcarer, a hall helper, or simply someone who takes “one weed out each walk,” your care counts. Together we keep this place healthy, for people, wildlife and the next generation learning to love the land as we do.

Lake Macquarie community invited to assist with seagrass restoration

Operation Posidonia, a project led by marine ecologists from UNSW Sydney and the Sydney Institute of Marine Science, aims to restore endangered Posidonia australis seagrass meadows in Lake Macquarie with the help of local citizen scientists. 

Posidonia meadows are an incredibly important habitat for a variety of fish species, capturing large amounts of carbon and protecting shorelines from erosion. They have been declining at an alarming rate in NSW’s most populated estuaries due to human pressures. One of the most significant ongoing threats to Posidonia meadows is traditional swing moorings with heavy chains that scour the seafloor.

Operation Posidonia is combining seagrass rehabilitation with environmentally friendly moorings, which don’t have a swinging chain component, while also restoring the species to old mooring ‘scars’ where the seagrass has not recovered naturally. Operation Posidonia has developed a restoration method that doesn’t require removing donor material from remaining vulnerable meadows. 

Citizen scientists known as the ‘Storm Squad’ are asked to collect naturally-detached fragments of the seagrass that wash ashore in strong winds. If fragments still have a rhizome (anchoring structure) attached, they can be replanted underwater. Operation Posidonia is focusing its efforts around Belmont and Marks Point, where most of the Lake’s Posidonia meadows are found. Replanting of seagrass collected by citizen scientists began in May near Belmont Baths.  

 

Most of Lake Macquarie’s Posidonia meadows exist on the Eastern side of the lake, between Swansea and Belmont. Small pockets exist elsewhere, such as at Coal Point. Depending on wind conditions, however, it is possible to find Posidonia fragments in almost all corn

ers of the lake. You can expect to find washed-up fragments around Coal Point and Toronto after strong southerly and easterly winds.  

 

There are moves afoot to get a collection station at the Toronto Baths, but in the meantime fragments can be deposited at Belmont Baths.

 

Find out all the information you need to join the Storm Squad at operationposidonia.com/lake-macquarie  

Clayton Mead | Research Assistant , UNSW Sydney

Citizen Science in November - Frogs & Pollinators

FrogID Week 8-17 November 2019 

FrogID is a national citizen science project that is helping us learn more about what is happening to Australia’s frogs. All around the country, people are recording frog calls with nothing more than a smartphone.

Taking part in FrogID Week will help provide scientists with valuable data for the protection and conservation of frogs. The data will help track the Cane Toad and identify where frogs are thriving and where they aren’t. And by matching calls to weather and habitat, we are learning more about how different frog species are responding to a changing environment.

frogid.net.au

Wild Pollinator Count 10–17 November 

The Wild Pollinator Count gives you an opportunity to contribute to wild pollinator insect conservation in Australia. We invite you to count wild pollinators in your local environment and help us build a database on wild pollinator activity.

You can join in by watching any flowering plant for just ten minutes sometime in our count week. 

Here's a quick guide to pollinator Id from the Wild Pollinator people.

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Celebrate Science Week August 11-19

Celebrate Science Week August 11-19 by joining in the

Great Aussie Bioquest

In our community we are surrounded by some amazing plants, animals and fungi. We have lots of tracks to trek along as well. This makes for a fun adventure to join in for Science Week, The Great Aussie BioQuest, the largest bioblitz in Australia’s history.

Bioquest is run through the QuestaGame App. Your sightings contribute to real research and conservation , it’s free to join and there are even prizes.

All you need is a camera, and it can be the one on your phone or in the app. You don’t need to know what the lifeform is, but you get bonus points if you can identify it.

To better protect life on Earth (including ourselves), we need to learn more about what is out there. So far, we have only described a fraction of the species of life on our planet - and even for those we know of, there is a lot more we can learn about their distribution.

QuestaGamer’s sightings are shared with CSIRO’s Atlas of Living Australia and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility - the world’s premier collection of biodiversity records. As of April 2017, our data has had 50 million record downloads - helping researchers understand how we can better manage and protect biodiversity in a changing world.

This image by John Sharples provides amazing detail of a local Orchid. There are a few tricks to getting an image to look like this...as John explains.

The Acianthus is a small ground orchid some 80mm high. The flower head is about 5 or 6mm high. The size of the flower dictated the type of photography applied; a process known as focus stacking.

To achieve the image a camera was set on a tripod with a macro lens and tethered to a laptop computer. The lens front was some 150mm from the front of the flower with a resulting in focus area, depth of field, of approximately 1 to 1.5mm. The software controlling the camera was set to take 60 images over a focal distance of 15mm. After each image is stored the software inches the camera’s focal distance forward about .25 of a millimetre.

This process takes around 10 seconds per image so about 6 to 10 minutes for the photography and nearer to half an hour for the setup. The 60 images are then taken into the stacking program where the in-focus part of each image is used to slowly build up the final, stacked, image.

After a small amount of cleaning up in Lightroom the flowers were cut out of their natural background and pasted into the uniform dark background you see.
From first observations of the bud to the image before you, I checked the plant over a period of some three weeks and then photographed the plant on four separate occasions plus some 10 or more computer hours to produce the final image.

Unfortunately, the flower head has wilted and a clearer middle image is not possible, but watch this space as a multiple headed stem is in bud. I think it was worth the effort.

Please enjoy.John Sharples

Got a birdbath? Bathing Birds Project is looking for citizen scientists

National Parks Association of New South Wales (NPA) in partnership with Birds in Backyards and The University of Sydney are seeking participants for an exciting new citizen science initiative: Bathing Birds. In this initiative we will be exploring which birds are using bird baths and how our gardening habitats are influencing which birds are present.

The project will run from Friday the 27th of June until Sunday the 27 of July and we will run the project again in January to compare differences in birds using the bath. To take part all you need is a birdbath that you can monitor for 20 minutes up to 3 times a week

If you are already registered as a citizen scientist with NPA please contact Dr. Gráinne Cleary at grainnec@npansw.org.au. If you are new to NPA citizen science, go to www.bathingbirds.org.au to sign up!

On Sunday 22 June, 10am – noon Project Coordinator Dr Grainne Cleary will present on current National Parks Association (NSW) programs and partnerships including Bathing Birds and Great Koala Count at the Belmont Neighbourhood Centre, 359 Pacific Highway, Belmont North

Bookings are essential to Council on 4921 0333.