News - recent updates and new pages

We are always updating pages and adding new (and we hope interesting to our visitors) pictures and information to the First Nature Website. Here you will find information about major updates as well as news of forthcoming books, press releases etc:

December 2011: Wales Wildlife: Nature Reserves in Wales - coverage greatly extended

This major section (accessed direct via www.waleswildlife.com for from the Wild Wales tab on the top of every First Nature page) has been greatly extended, now covering nearly all of the National Nature Reserves and many RSPB and Wildlife Trust reserves too.

The official launch of this online resource will be fairly early in the New Year.

In the increasingly popular Fungi section, spore microphotographs have been added to several of our species pages. For example see Clitocybe nebularis, commonly known as the Clouded Funnel...

November 2011: sort fungi by approximate spore colour

We have completed the prototype spore-colour sorting facility of our Fungi index page, and we welcome user feedback. Now, as well as sorting the Great Big Index Table of species alphabetically by either Scientific names or Common Names, or arranging species into their Mycological Families, you can also organise the table in order of Spore-print Colour - white, various shades of cream, shades of ochre; pink, rusty brown, mid brown, dark brown, purplish or black. It's only a rough guide, but we hope this will be a further help when you are trying to identify fungi.

Also for Fungi Folk we have now included a Beginners Guide to Choosing and Using a Microscope...

October 2011: many new species added to our Fungi Section

We have added dozens of new pages plus new pictures of many species - Gomphidius glutinosus, Slimy Spike, for example. This work will continue through the autumn and winter months.

Also this month five more National Nature Reserves in Wales now have detailed pages giving location, access, habitats, species and facilities information plus very detailed 'how to get there' information and maps. For an example see the Cwm Clydach NNR page...

September 2011: Fascinated by Fungi launched to critical acclaim

The book is now available via our online bookshop and from Amazon as well as through good bookshops.

July 2011: Fascinated by Fungi - Special Pre-launch Offer

Pat O'Reilly's big book (450 pages) about fungi is now in the printers. Full details and a special 20% pre-launch discount offer are now online...

June 2011: Fungi section is now live

Our Fungi section has now been updated to reflect recent changes in the genera of many species (for example the Inkcaps) as a result of DNA analysis. We have also taken this opportunity to convert pages to the new layout style. You can now sort the Index Table by either Scientific names, Common Names or Mycological Families. A Spore Colour sorting facility is planned for the near future.

May 2011: New Layout Style

In the fifteen years or so since we began putting our wildlife and ecology pages onto the Web, much has changed with website design and technology. While we know that there is no substitute for good content, our original pages were based on tables and took longer to load than necessary nowadays. We have now switched to layouts based entirely (or in the case of Index pages mainly) on cascading stylesheets. The new layout looks more 21st Century, we think, and we hope that you like it too. Progressively all sections are being converted to the new layout style, but that means updating more than 1200 pages; so, for a short while, we will continue to have some sections in the old style. Our target is to have completed the conversion by the end of July 2011 at the latest... watch this space!

May 2011: New Structure for our Fungi section

DNA analysis has convinced professional mycologists that many well-known fungi do not belong to the genera in which they were originally placed (even though some have been moved many times over the past 200 years or so!). In some cases species have even moved to different families. Reflecting these changes, we are reorganising our Identification Guide to include the new families in which some of the inkcaps and toughshanks (for example) have now been placed. As an added advantage, the URLs become shorter, because we include the genus name but not the family in the URL for a page.

So how do you find information about families? Easy: our new Fungi Index will provide the facility for sorting species either in Genus order or in order of scientific Families - that's in addition to the facility to sort either by Common Name or by Spore Colour. We're working on this now, but if you would like to see how it will work please visit our Wildflowers Section...