Resources: (return of) the Illawarra Remnant Bushland Database!

After an absence of a couple of years, a really amazing local resource for growing Illawarra natives is back up and publicly available! If you want to know what plants grow naturally near you, and so will probably do well at your place too, the Illawarra Remnant Bushland Database is going to be useful to you. 

You can find the resurrected database at www.irbd.com.au.

It contains records of local (and introduced) species, and where they have been seen locally, across a mix of public and private land. It has been operating, in one form or another, for decades, and it contains records from as long ago as the early 1980s. 

The Illawarra Remnant Bushland Database, showing the list of sides and the map that allows you to search for a site by the area where it's located.

You can use this database in a few different ways, depending on your aims and interests. 

One option is to search by area, so you can find sites near your target area to see what plant species have been recorded there over the years. You can do this using the map at the top of the page, and moving around to see what sites have been included near your target area. You can then check out the species list for each of those sites. This kind of search is particularly useful if you are regenerating bushland on a property, and would like to understand the range of species that might have occurred there before it was cleared or otherwise transformed. 

Another option is to find out where a particular plant species has been recorded. This kind of search search will tell you all the sites surveyed across the region found that species to be present. So if you want to get a sense of where a species like Native Holly (Alchornea ilicifolia) occurs, you can do a search just for that species. The search results also allow you to look at the other plants that species is recorded to grow with at different sites around the region.

Searching by species allows you to see where in the region an individual plant species has been recorded. Click on the 'species' tab at the top right of the page (greyed out in this image).

Records of introduced and non-local species that have been planted or naturalised in the area area are also included, and are indicated separately. And the database can be used together with other resources, such as PlantNET, if you want to develop a more detailed picture of where a species occurs. 

Many people have contributed to iterations of the database over the years. Acknowledgements are included here. 

Welcome back, Illawarra Remnant Bushland Database!