Over the holiday break Ecolincnz reached a significant milestone with our 10000th visitor. When the blog was launched on April 4th 2009 we hoped to provide information about ecology research being done in and around Lincoln University, particularly at the Department of Ecology. We weren’t sure what to expect but we did hope that Kiwis, especially high school kids and their teachers, might like to see what was being done in their own backyard. We also hoped that a few overseas visitors might drop by. Since 5th April 2010 we have collected information on where visitors come from. Although Canterbury is the biggest source of visitors in New Zealand (1084) there are more visitors from the North Island overall.

What is surprising is that 59% of our traffic is from overseas. one in four visitors are from the US with most of them from Califonia, Texas and New York – we have someone from every state except South Dakota! There is a large gap back to the next countries: United Kingdom (5%), Australia (4%) and Canada (3%). It’s hard to know what to make of some of these numbers. Germany with 125 visitors seems low given the close links that Lincoln has with Gottingen University whereas 71 from the Philippines seems more than we might expect. For the single visitors from Iceland, Angola, Cambodia, Uruguay and the 20 other countries with one visitor we say welcome, come back soon, and bring a friend. At this stage we are still happy with how things are going, and we even use the blog as an assessment tool for our masters students, so we will continue to bring you details about ecology in our region.