About Us

The University of Reading Whiteknights Campus is 130 hectares in extent and includes woodland, biodiverse grassland and a lake comprising three interconnected sections.  Over many years staff and students have built up records of what has been found living on campus from tiny mosses to huge trees and insects to mammals.  This blog aims to give greater access to new records and to encourage local participation in the seasonal recording on what life is found on campus.

The Whiteknights Biodiversity project was established with a start-up grant from the Faculty of Life Sciences.  Activities in the project include training in blogging for UG and MSc stduents and active encouragement of student participation in reporting of  biodiversity on campus.  There is a particularly close link with the MSc courses in Plant Diversity and Species Identification and Survey Skills where all students are signed in as potential bloggers. Our activities form part of the JISC Digitally Ready project in which Alastair Culham is an academic advisor.

The major individual student contributors are Thomas Whitlock (Birds) and Justin Groves (Insects) and major staff contributors are Jonathan Mitchley (Plant Ecologist), Alastair Culham (Plant Taxonomist) and Paul Hatcher (Plant-Animal interactions) but there are now around 60 individual contributors.

The University has an official Biodiversity Policy that is downloadable.

Occasional Twitter feeds are tagged #RUWBio

For permission to use images or content on this blog please contact Alastair Culham a.culham@reading.ac.uk.

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