Hello everyone,
Welcome to our first ‘test’ online newsletter.
As I take up my new role as BRaid’s manager, one of my goals is to create a communications strategy that fulfils BRaid’s vision of increasing awareness of braided river ecosystems, promoting co-operation between stakeholders, and collecting and storing information. To achieve this, I’m currently creating what I hope will be a user-friendly multi-purpose information hub where everyone, from professionals at the top of their game to children wanting to learn about braided rivers, can find answers and share knowledge; especially knowledge that doesn’t always make it into peer-reviewed journals.
Many of you have a wealth of information in your heads, but most of you also have limited time and resources, and so you can only apply your knowledge and experience to your particular project(s). This e-newsletter, like some of the website features mentioned below, aims to help break through some of those barriers so we can all share information and hopefully, optimise our limited resources. While we might all be working in different areas, we want the same outcomes: to reverse the alarming trend in our braided river ecosystems.
This newsletter does not replace print newsletters sent to BRAid members; rather it’s a ‘news snippet’ newsletter; just, headlines with a few words in a quick, easy to skim email. Click links to more information, or delete it if items are of no interest to you.
For this newsletter to be successful, the content needs to come from you. Pose questions. Share problems. Tell us what you (or the animals) are doing. It might be situation normal when others are finding quite the opposite. Talk about failures. They’re just as crucial as successes because they build on knowledge and lead to better practices. Send a link to a video or journal article, your progress on a project. And photos! Even if it’s just you looking through a microscope or a DNA chart, that lets others know about your research. Something trivial to you might trigger a eureka moment in others. Think of this as a free ‘classified’ page for braided river practitioners. And don’t be shy. Regular contributors will be rewarded!
What you are seeing now is either the PDF I emailed (in which case the links won’t work), or the online version of the newsletter (if you clicked the link I provided in the body of the email, in which case, the links will work). To receive future newsletters, please sign up for them online, as this is the only time I will be manually emailing it, as I don’t want to bug you with endless requests.
Meanwhile, I hope you enjoy this first newsletter.
Sonny Whitelaw, BRaid Manager (manager@braid.org.nz)
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