[BSW] June meeting + Saturday Arlington Bioblitz + More

Kathy Bilton kathy at fred.net
Thu May 18 17:08:53 PDT 2017


The next BSW meeting will be on Tuesday, June 6.  Melanie Shori will be 
speaking about strange plants of Asia.

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>From Rod Simmons:

The Arlington BioBlitz is Saturday, May 20.  The sign up page is 
http://www.signupgenius.com/go/60b0b4fa8ab22a31-sign.

There are still lots of openings on various teams to join!  All are 
welcome.  This should be a fun day amidst high quality natural areas, 
abundant native biodiversity, and fellow nature enthusiasts.  (There’s 
even a separate team for tree surveys.)

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Periodical Cicadas are here!  See the Capital Naturalist for more 
information: 
http://capitalnaturalist.blogspot.com/2017/05/periodical-cicadas-early-emergence.html?m=1.

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Another great local website is Bill’s Botanical Forays, focusing on the 
Patuxent Research Refuge Plant Inventory Project - at 
http://www.botanybill.info
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NATURAL COMMUNITIES OF VIRGINIA THIRD APPROXIMATION WEBSITE IS NOW ONLINE!
http://www.dcr.virginia.gov/natural-heritage/natural-communities/


A major update to The Natural Communities of Virginia web content is now 
complete and available through DCR’s website.  The Natural Communities of 
Virginia: a Classification of Ecological Community Groups and Community 
Types (Third approximation, Version 3.0) is the latest in a series of 
successive versions of the natural community classification since the 
initial hard-copy publication in 2001.  The new web site is more richly 
illustrated, with nearly 1500 captioned natural community photos added in 
gallery-style pages linked from the Ecological Group pages.  Ecological 
Community Group range maps have been added and the classification itself 
has been updated and refined to reflect recent state-wide and range-wide 
analyses. Plant species compositional summary tables for each Community 
Type are available as downloadable MS Excel tables on each Ecological 
Community Group page.  In addition to conceptual and nomenclatural changes 
to Ecological Groups and Community Types, refinements to the organization 
levels of the classification have been made that we hope will improve the 
user’s experience.

In concert with the web content update, the Natural Heritage resource 
list, Natural Communities of Virginia: Ecological Groups and Community 
Types:  a listing with conservation status ranks (PDF) has been updated to 
reflect recent classification changes. All changes since the 2013 version 
are listed in Appendix A. This downloadable document can function as a 
hardcopy list or an interactive digital document that links to further 
information about Virginia’s Natural Communities.
http://www.dcr.virginia.gov/natural-heritage/natural-communities/document/comlist04-17.pdf

Natural Communities are central to the Division of Natural Heritage’s 
mission of documenting, protecting, and managing Virginia’s biodiversity. 
The Ecological Community Groups and Community types defined in this 
hierarchical classification developed by DCR-DNH Ecologists, provide 
ecosystem targets for inventory, mapping, research, monitoring, 
restoration, and conservation.


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