What habitat is that? Phase 0 - at best

One of my pet peeves is the way that much concern about "the" environment is reduced to concern about one or two species.  I have heard it said that in some cases the species of concern is the one which a (now) person-of-influence studied back in the day.  The problem is that the forces of evil (ie developers) claim that, if an area of remnant bush doesn't have a Lesser-spotted Bandersnatch in every tree hollow or some Rosy-hued Bogwort flowering pinkly next to each Joycea tussock, they are at liberty to trash it with their customary jollity.

One exception to that comment is the general recognition that the grassy-box woodland of the Tablelands is a habitat under threat so effort is made (by environmentalists) to preserve that habitat.

All of that leads in to my thinking that it would be interesting, and possibly helpful, to try to establish what habitat types the ANPS walks have covered, as well as which species have been seen.  It could be possible to do this by eyeballing the sites, but that wouldn't be much help as the developers would say it is just opinion.  Environmental agency staff could probably offer a professional view, but they don't seem to visit the places we go - at least we very, very rarely meet them on site.  (Perhaps they are too busy workshopping strategies?) So I have decided to try to work out a post-hoc method of classification.

My starting point is the book "Ocean Shores to Desert Dunes" by David Keith.  This work lists and describes 100 classes of vegetation.  Many of these (eg Oceanic Cloud Forests; Gibber Transition Shrublands; Clarence Dry Sclerophyll Forests) are not found in the area the ANPS Wednesday Walkers (WW) cover.   My hope is to use the information Keith provides on Indicative species for each vegetation class, in conjunction with the species lists from the WW, to attach a habitat type (my term, at this stage broadly equivalent to Keith's Vegetation Class) to each site.

As might be expected the WWs have not located all of the indicative species listed by Keith.  There seem to be two situations.

• The species is not found in - or even close to - the area covered by the WWs.  An example is Drymophila moorei, taking the range shown on Plantnet as definitive.

• The species is possible within WW range, but we just haven't IDd it.  Hibbertia dentata is an example of this.

The more Western of the locations circled in red are quite close to sites we have visited in Monga and Morton NPs. So a first by-product (or perhaps collateral damage) of this project is to generate a list of species for which we should keep an eye out!

The approach I have adopted is to set up a table of every "good" taxon identified by WWs (ie excluding the 'sp.' entries) and check off for each vegetation class the species in my table.

I have done this thus far for "Cool Temperate Rainforests" (11 matching species) and "South Coast Wet Sclerophyll Forests" (21 matching species).

My next step was to interrogate my total set of WW records (~12,000) for sites in which at least one of the species in each habitat type had been recorded.

For Cool Temperate Rainforest 57 sites were identified with at least 1 of the indicative species.  The sites with the highest number of indicative species were as follows:

Site Name	Count Of Species
Waratah Picnic area and Penance Grove	9
Tinderries Round Flat Fire Trail	6
Chalet Road	6
Palarang Rd	5
Tinderries Top	5
Monga Loop Rd	5
Corn Trail Link	5

The three sites highlighted in bold are those which I would have expected a rainforest habitat to be identified.  All of the others are high, sites with more humid environments and forested rather than wooded.

I also reverse-engineered the query to investigate the number of sites at with each of these 11 indicative species were found.

Species name	Count Of Site
Acacia melanoxylon	50
Tasmannia lanceolata	21
Polystichum proliferum	20
Dicksonia antarctica	15
Coprosma quadrifida	15
Smilax australis	12
Stellaria flaccida	3
Elaeocarpus holopetalus	3
Fieldia australis	2
Eucryphia moorei	1
Blechnum wattsii	1

These results are not surprising.  Acacia melanoxylon (Blackwood) is indeed widespread and Eucryphia moorei is indeed only found in one of 'our' sites.  It does however demonstrate the potential for fallacies of composition in that while a rainforest site might be expected to have these species, the presence of one or two of these species doesn't mean the site is a rainforest.

WRT "South Coast Wet Sclerophyll Forests" the sites with the highest count of indicative species (remembering that the total is 21 rather than the 11 for the preceding Vegetation class) were:

Site Name	CountOfSpecies name
Booroomba Rocks	14
Tinderries Round Flat Fire Trail	13
Monga Loop Rd	12
Corn Trail old start	10
Tinderries Top	9
Main Ridge FT	9
South Forest Rd Stop 1	9
Lyrebird Cascade Trails	8
Mt Bollard	8
Grassy Flat_and_Settlers Track	8

By and large these sites are all forested (although the fires which went through the Tinderry site in 2009 opened the canopy more than somewhat).  I have highlighted the two sites which also had a good number of Rainforest indicators.

In conclusion I suggest that

• the process I am following seems practicable;
• at a broad level at least the results seem plausible; but
• there is a lot more work to do!

Despite the third point  I think it is worth floating this early note for people's information and, should they feel so inclined, comments.  My next step will be to enter up the Indicative species for the remaining Vegetation Classes (at a rough count I think there are about a dozen likely contenders) and generate lists similar to those above.  Then I will attempt to work out how to analyse them.  (I will also be progressing entering WWs to the database so the results shown above may change and will certainly need to be updated!)