Welcome to the Wisley project!
Hello and thankyou for joining us on the Wisley project.
This project allows us to communicate with you as a group, something I would like to do more of. It also gives easy access to Wisley specific data. As you can see from the project homepage, Wisley has 845 species recorded by 328 different people, which is already incredible. If you click on the stats button you can see the breakdown of taxa, unsurprisingly plants are in the lead, but insects are not far off!
What I find most exciting is that there is a lot more out there. The Great Dixter audit recorded 2029 species, and some of you may have heard Fergus Garratt reference Jennifer Owen, who recorded 2673 species in her small suburban garden - although she did take 30 years to do it! Wisley is larger than both and has immense plant diversity, so I believe we have just as many species hiding out here.
We also have the advantage that like Owen, we have no time limit on this project, and like Dixter, we have many eyes to help us... including visitors with a specialist interest, our on site science team, hoards of visitors and most importantly us horticulturists who spend so much time out there immersed in the undergrowth.
I'm hoping that even the casual use of this app will encourage us to pay even more attention to the wildlife around us. We are familiar with the idea of 'plant blindness' (the inability to see plants as individuals instead of a mass of green stuff) and we know that awareness and knowledge are key to opening ourselves up to the world of plants. I believe the same can be said be for all groups of wildlife, especially the small stuff! The more you learn, the more you will see...
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