The self-seeded pumpkins have taken over the front raingarden. The grapevine’s leaves are turning brown and slowly shedding in the back. The raingardens’ productive summer ends with us in lockdown, giving me time to reflect on the raingarden news I have let slip over the last year. A year ago,…
The shiny apps that urbanstreams.net has been hosting are migrating to a new server at tools.thewerg.unimelb.edu.au. Three are there now, with the rest to come on line soon. We are also in the process of migrating urbanstreams.net to a new server, where it will become primarily a repository for my…
The raingarden‘s vine has provided us with great shade from our horrible, hot summer, and come March, it has provided us with a bumper crop of grapes that we have struggled to keep up with. As we reach the end of the season, the local lorikeets have discovered them. They…
Thanks to Angela Ross and Annah Fromberg of the ABC for putting together their story on stormwater solutions featuring our raingarden. Nice work! It’s enough to shame me into keeping my new years resolution of resuming my raingarden story. The raingarden has really hit its straps this year, with a…
We have worked with Melbourne Water to collate their collection of macroinvertebrate assemblage records from streams of the Greater Melbourne region over the last 25 years into a database, and have made it available and searchable on an open-access web interface (https://tools.thewerg.unimelb.edu.au/mwbugs/). This rich resource of biological information has been…
Sure, this might be a bit niche, but in preparation for the imminent release of a portal for Melbourne Water’s stream macroinvertebrate database, I’ve created a data-entry app for compiling macroinvertebrate assemblage data into a table that is suitable for entry into the database (and suitable for analysis on its…
It’s been a long time between posts (I’ve been away for much of the year: more on that later). This return to the blog is to announce the completion of the Melbourne Water Stream Network v1.0, now available at tools.thewerg.unimelb.edu.au/mwstr/*. The stream network is a spatial database, comprising a stream…
I’ve added another entry to my raingarden diary today, primarily spurred by (an old picture of) the raingarden featuring on the front cover of the current issue of ReNew magazine. (I see that the issue includes an article by friend of urbanstreams.net, Peter Coombes, on the performance of the rainwater harvesting…