Contents

Society News – notes from the Chair

Mags Cousins

The biggest news for the Society this year is that we let a contract to James Drever of Careful Digital to develop an online tool for interrogating the botanical records held in the Shropshire Ecological Data Network dataset, and this will be done via the NBN Atlas API. That was bit of a mouthful but basically it means that we will be able to easily search for species at a site, county or square resolution from a laptop or mobile device, using our own curated botanical data. We are delighted to be working with James who used to be an IT manager at the Field Studies Council, and is therefore immersed in the biological recording community and sees the future potential of this tool for us and for other recording groups into the future.

Below: Mock-up of what the online flora tool will look like

Meetings

It may have taken a global pandemic to force us into going online for the entire year, but it was actually great fun too and it was lovely to see all of those who joined in. We will be sticking with Zoom for forthcoming spring meeting but thereafter we hope to resume field meetings at some point during the season.

Spring Meeting 2–4pm, Sat. 24th April, by Zoom

We don’t need to do any society business as we held an AGM not that long ago in September last year, so we can go straight to the fun bit. It will be our pleasure to welcome the irrepressible, inexhaustible force for botany Josh Styles to give us an insight into the work he has been doing for the North West Rare Plants Initiative. The talk will be: “Three years into the North West Rare Plant Initiative” The NWRPI aims to cultivate and reintroduce