CWF Launches New Website!
by Ben Wurst, Senior Wildlife Biologist
Over the past several months we have been working to get our new website online. Our old site was a good one, with a whole lot of educational content, but it became cumbersome and outdated. Although the site continued to draw tens of thousands of visitors, it was incompatible with current servers and had to be replaced. With generous support from the Merrill G. and Emita E. Hastings Foundation, Osprey Foundation, Sambol Family Foundation, and invaluable help from contributors, partners, and volunteers, we were able to develop and launch our new site. We hope you’ll become a frequent visitor!
You’ll find the new site is much more user friendly, responsive, and focuses on beautiful photographs of rare and at-risk species of New Jersey. This was a crucial aspect of our new design — showcasing beautiful portraits of wildlife and our biologists working in the field. We also wanted to highlight all the people who help wildlife, so a lot of photos showcase many of our staff and volunteers working in the field. You will find updated descriptions for our various wildlife conservation projects. One new feature includes easy to find links (at the top of our site) to our various live streaming wildlife cameras, like the Union County Falcon Cam, Barnegat Light Osprey Cam, and Duke Farms Eagle Cam. Interactive features are built into each of these pages where viewers can leave comments, post screenshots and interact with biologists who work with these species. Among other things, we have a dedicated page for resources, like annual reports, brochures, guides, and we also have a page where you can report your sighting of an endangered species to NJDEP Fish & Wildlife.
Those who have used our site as a resource for learning about endangered and threatened wildlife in New Jersey know that our Online Field Guide was a staple for this information. With our old site being outdated, our guide went dark. We are now happy to report that our Wildlife Field Guide is back online with new imagery, range maps and detailed life history information about 200+ rare species in New Jersey! Our Field Guide is especially important for our environmental educators and students who rely on it to research for entering the Species on the Edge Art + Essay Content (open now!).
Thank you to our website developer, VINYL, and everyone who supported and assisted Conserve Wildlife Foundation of NJ during this process! A special round of thanks to the many photographers who allowed us to use their work on our site, including Ray Hennessy, Dave Blinder, Eric Sambol, Lynn Sambol, Jim Verhagen, Matt Reitinger, Scott Miller, Bob Cunningham, Randy Lubischer, Eric Hance, Shayna Marchese, Blaine Rothauser, Howie Williams, Brian Kushner and Steve Buckingham. We are really looking forward to adding more useful content to our website to help build greater appreciation for wildlife in New Jersey.