Web of life
A place is not a list of residents. It is a set of connections between them: who shelters whom, who moves whose pollen, who trades what underground. The web of life is that whole picture, drawn as the place itself.
The places documented so far
Start with country you know, or follow the coast from river and wallum to rainforest, mountain and sea.
Wallum heath with its scribbly-gum and paperbark margins, on some of the poorest sand on the coast. Half of the picture is underground, because half of this place is.
80 residents and features · 145 connections: most of them the everyday ecology of this kind of country, a few recorded for these species elsewhere and a few seen on this ground itself. How each one is known →
Paperbark swamp, saltmarsh, mangrove band and seagrass shallows: one river's country, sorted by how far the tide reaches. The tide's whole ladder is in the picture, because the tide is what runs the place.
63 residents and features · 80 connections: most of them the everyday ecology of this kind of country and a few recorded for these species elsewhere. How each one is known →
Fifty-five hectares of the old big scrub on deep red basalt: a closed roof, a dark floor, and the last of a forest that once ran the length of the range. The soil gets the smallest band, because this forest keeps its wealth overhead and barely lets it touch the ground.
58 residents and features · 79 connections: every one of them the everyday ecology of this kind of country. How each one is known →
Open eucalypt forest on a rhyolite hill: grey gum and tallowwood koala country over a grassy, sunlit floor. The canopy gets most of the picture, because this place is run from overhead, and what carries a citation here is the hollow the night shift sleeps in.
58 residents and features · 100 connections: most of them the everyday ecology of this kind of country and a few recorded for these species elsewhere. How each one is known →
Beach, swash, seagrass pasture and two-oceans reef, the land's gradient carried on under the waves. Every named ground here is a different real place, headland rock and offshore pinnacle and sheltered passage, because the sea country has no single square of sand to stand on. It is a road as much as a residence.
70 residents and features · 118 connections: most of them the everyday ecology of this kind of country, a few recorded for these species elsewhere and a few seen on this ground itself. How each one is known →
Pick one living thing and the web names everything it deals with, in plain words: what it eats, who eats it, what it shelters, who moves its pollen and what it hands back to the ground. Press a partner and it takes the middle. The drawing moves with you, keeping each relationship in the country where it happens.
Every connection carries a mark saying how it is known. Seen here means recorded in that place itself. Seen elsewhere means recorded for these species somewhere else. General ecology means the ordinary, well-understood workings of that kind of country. The complete quotation and source sit on each web's evidence register.
5 webs are live, and that is the honest count. They run from the reef to the range, and the coast holds more country than that. Each new place needs its own drawn scene and its own sourced connections, so the next web arrives when its records do and not before. Nothing here is generated from a database overnight, because a line between two species is a claim, and claims need warrants.