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The new site and geospatial backend is now live for testing at trails.namadgi.au! We have a small amount of test data on it just so you can see how it operates. We haven't opened account registration to the public just yet, but just so you know, it's going to be a 100% free site.

The new site is a web application for documenting the park, with emphasis on mapping, photography and exploration on foot. Users (that would be you) can upload GPS tracks, mark points of interest with coordinates and photos, and write articles that tie these together into trip reports.

Record your adventures!

The core data flow is: You go hiking! When you get home you can do any or all of these:

• Upload a GPS track of your route (.gpx file and description), which will automatically be thrown onto a zoomable topographic map with elevation plot.
• Create points of interest if you saw something noteworthy (position and description), which will be placed on a map.
• Upload cool photos from your trip, with captions.
• Write an article (trip report).

You can link all this stuff together:

• Attach photos to your tracks, points of interest and trip reports, which display as a gallery, or apply them as 'cover' photos or banners.
• Attach points of interest (POI) to your tracks.
• Attach tracks to your trip reports.

Your own content is available to you through the user menu (and to everyone else via search). But if an admin deems a piece worthy, they might promote it to the main map and where it become part of the curated collection, and to the home page where it will be highlighted.

Namadgi.au is designed literally from the ground up to run on fumes, making use of the cheapest viable hardware, free services, open source software and data sources. This article outlines the current tech stack and free resources we leveraged to establish and maintain this site on the cheap.

It turns out that, if you have an old computer lying around, that's probably enough hardware to provide a decent website that you can run from home. It's a bit of extra work to get the machine on the internet, but it's a good starting point.

After digging through available records this article should shed light on what we know for sure, and what are likely misidentifications, translocations, taxonomic changes or just maybe, genuinely rare. It's the rare ones that are interesting. We should go take a closer look at those, right?

Just getting started so there's not a lot to see yet, but...namadgi.au is a study of Namadgi National Park and the Brindabella Range. It will explore the park's fauna, flora, ecology, environment, history and geology. It will pull together information from scientific reports and surveys, maps, and historical documents, which will be assembled into an archive. It will also incorporate a lot of web-based geospatial mapping of tracks and trails, and points of interest. This is a privately organised endeavour and has no official standing.

Turns out the ACT is one of the most surveyed, scanned and digitised bits of real estate on the planet. There is a wealth of historical reports, surveys, maps and plans out there. It's all scattered about and the contents are largely lost to memory, but pulling these together into useful collections is a long term goal. There's some fascinating information in there, if you are prepared to scrape about.

This page lists some of the more important data sources used in preparation of this site.

Fifteen species of frog are currently recognised to occur naturally in the ACT. A further three species are considered to have become locally extinct. The available information on distribution, abundance and evidence of change for all 18 species is reviewed.

Conservation status assigned to each species on a national level are summarised. The status of each species in terms of distribution and abundance in the ACT is evaluated and potential threats, further requirements for survey, monitoring and management are outlined.