Across the Watershed - Spring 2001

By about the time you read this, you should be able to go to GSWA’s Web site (www.greatswamp.org) and take a virtual walking tour of the Association’s 23-acre Conservation and Education Area on Tiger Lily Lane in Harding Township.

The tour features text and photos provided by Blaine Rothauser, and an interactive map developed by John Malay. Both are longtime GSWA volunteers: naturalist Rothauser manages the Conservation Area’s ecological restoration, and computer expert Malay is the Association’s webmaster.

That’s not all that’s going on at greatswamp.org. Thanks to volunteer Scott Kissinger, who’s an AT&T attorney in his day job, Across the Watershed is now posted each quarter. And another computer whiz, Anna Nagy, volunteers her time to make sure GSWA press releases are regularly posted on the site, available there for local media to copy and transfer to their own computers.

Nagy has also worked to make GSWA’s "Saving Streamways" available to help local property owners understand why the Association is tackling its Streamways Acquisition Project (see article, page x). And she’s currently working with GSWA GIS Analyst (and ex-Education and Outreach Director) Karen Patterson to upload Patterson’s "Teacher’s Guide to the Great Swamp Watershed." When that’s available, local educators will be able to print out copies of the guide (or portions of it), saving GSWA printing costs and permitting easy browsing from the teacher’s PC.

Earlier this spring, Malay and GSWA Communications Director Missy Small also collaborated to create an electronic version of a "Do the Swamp Thing" color brochure, aimed at attracting local residents to swamp-related events and activities during Earth Month in April.

Is anyone taking advantage of the site, which also has information about the ten towns spanned by the watershed, information about GSWA and other swamp-based organizations, and links to other swamp-related websites?

As webmaster Malay notes, "Though we’re obviously not on the top of everyone’s list of favorite sites, we have seen good growth in the number of visitors over the past year. Last year around the beginning of spring, we could count just over 1,000 visitors from the previous year. In the latest 12 months, we’ve had more than 4,000. As we continue to add value to the site, and to publicize that value to local residents, we think that the numbers will continue to accelerate."

It’s not as though the Watershed Association site has no competition, Malay observes.

"Right now the Google search engine (www.google.com) claims it surveys 1,346,966,000 pages of electronically stored text and pictures," he says, "and that number is probably conservative."

Nor is GSWA’s the only web site that has information about Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge and other organizations in the watershed. Ask Google to search for "Great Swamp in New Jersey," for example, and it will give you a list of 22,100 Web sites that might be of interest. (Not all are.) GSWA’s site is listed third.

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