Upland Wetlands of the New England Tablelands of NSW, colloquially known as lagoons, are listed as an endangered community on both the Australian and NSW state Acts. In spite of this the system is difficult to describe through traditional means as it is both ephemeral and does not represent a single vegetation community, but is a collective of types both spatially and temporally. Each lagoon has a different wetting and drying cycle due to their small catchments and occurrence within a generally aseasonal rainfall zone. Thus, only generalities of the trajectory of vegetation change can apply to the lagoon system as a whole and multiple alternative vegetation states can occur. Monitoring of these lagoons was conducted using both fixed plot sizes and also through transects. The data collected has been used to describe distinct vegetation assemblages within zonation at any one time and also at different stages of wetting and drying and across time. The information gained is used to define zones of permanency with seasonal fluctuation, zones which contain largely only two or a few alternative states and those that have multiple and difficult to predict ephemeral states.

New analytical techniques for assessing community structuring potentially offer critical insights into community patterns that can directly drive better management outcomes. A range-wide assessment of community patterns was undertaken for the critically endangered community Box Gum Woodland (BGW). In contrast to previous assessments which report little range-wide structuring, BGW is structured at the bioregional scale. Variants within bioregions also occur that relate to landscape patterns. Importantly, current expert derived vegetation classification and mapping across these scales that directly links to legislation has significant limitations. Novel assessments of diversity revealed important patterns previously unreported. These findings are related to a large-scale restoration and management program largely based on expert derived assessments of community structure.

Understanding and predicting how different drivers affect patterns of vegetation recovery is necessary to achieve desired restoration outcomes. Plant functional trait-based restoration measures may be easier to understand and predict than species-based measures, because they represent direct plant-environment relationships and account for species redundancy. However, Laughlin et al. (Journal of Applied Ecology, 54, 1058–1069, (2017)) found that abundance weighted mean trait-based measures were less predictable than structure-, species diversity-, and functional diversity index-based measures. Clearly, the usefulness of trait-based restoration measures requires further testing. We described structural-, species- and trait-based patterns of recovery for two mining areas in species-rich mediterranean-type shrublands (kwongan) in southwest Western Australia using vegetation monitoring data collected over 15 years in permanent transects and plots aged 4–37 years old. These shrublands are characterized by extremely low nutrient status and long periods of summer drought. We identified potential drivers from an extensive set of time, management, and environmental variables, and compared the predictability of structural-, species- and trait-based restoration measures. Patterns indicate a similar successional progression towards native references at both sites, but no management or environmental variables emerged as major explanatory drivers. Trait-based measures did not prove consistently more or less predictable than structural- or species-based measures, raising the challenges involved in the capture of driver variables, and the role of stochastic processes in restoration outcomes. However, including trait-based approaches allowed for more comprehensive description of recovery patterns than traditional structural- and species-based approaches only.

Demonstrating the effectiveness of environmental watering to maintain ecosystem health is becoming increasingly important, particularly in semiarid floodplain ecosystems. We evaluated the effects of a large-scale environmental flow event on a semi-arid floodplain lakeside plant assemblage for meeting the management goal of increasing water-dependent taxa and functional groups. We developed a multi-taxon Bayesian hierarchical model to describe temporal and small-scale spatial patterns in taxonomic occurrences. We then examined community summary metrics to evaluate patterns for the entire floodplain lakes system, the scale most relevant to management. Overall, in a system dominated by terrestrial dry plant taxa, 52.9% of terrestrial damp plant taxa showed a short-term increase in occurrence in response to the environmental flow, which translated into similar responses in some functional groups. However, nearly half of the plant taxa that increased then demonstrated a decline by 18-months after the flow event. Our community summary metrics captured these general results; however, they were disproportionately influenced by a few abundant plant taxa. These results highlight the advantages of multi-taxon models for interpreting flow responses and developing effective environmental flow management strategies, because they can be used to summarize community responses, while preserving important taxon-specific information. In semi-arid systems, where river regulation and climate change have reduced the frequency of flood events, the ability to deliver environmental flows during protracted periods of drought may be a policy option to restore or maintain the natural floodplain vegetation assemblage and prevents the transition to dryland taxa.

Community types provide a way to simplify vegetation pattern, informing research, management and conservation decision-making. While the theoretical basis of typologies and clustering is simple, in practise, systems with subtle vegetation patterns can be difficult to classify. We examine a 30,000-plot vegetation dataset from the northern jarrah forest of southwestern Australia for patterns of community differentiation and compare it to current units used in decision-making. Non-hierarchical clustering with monte-carlo simulation of groupings reveals indistinct types, with dominant species overlapping between most groups and uncommon species classified to both core and outlying types. Aspect, years since fire and species richness were significantly different between groups, but the effect of other remotely sensed topographic variables was weak. Comparison to other classifications systems showed poor correlation. This is likely due to differences in approach, i.e. the use of environmental variables to help separate floristic types or by focusing on key dominant species rather than full floristics (site vegetation types, forest ecosystem units). Our results suggest that classifying community types at fine scales is difficult in this system due to the subtlety of vegetation patterns. An alternative approach that encompasses, rather than over-simplifies this variation may be important if we are to genuinely ensure a ‘comprehensive, adequate and representative’ reserve system in this internationally significant biodiversity hotspot.

Woody encroachment by shrubs is a global threat to the structure, function and composition of native temperate grasslands – a vegetation type that is considered to be threatened in many parts of the world. Montane grasslands in the Surrey Hills area in Northwest Tasmania are some of the State’s most extensive and diverse grasslands. Most are of pre-European origin, with use of fire by Tasmanian Aborigines and post-colonial graziers and forestry companies (the current land managers) contributing to their maintenance in the landscape. Low intensity fire has been used for both fuel reduction and ecological objectives, and is guided by a fire management plan developed in 1998. In 2016/17, we collected floristic and environmental data from 105 non-permanent plots (1 x 10 m) from grassland sites managed by Forico Pty Limited. Major aims of the recent assessment included: analysing changes in vegetation composition and structure; assessing the effectiveness of fire management practices that had been implemented over the previous few decades; and providing recommendations relating to future management in the Surrey Hills grasslands. Our analyses showed that there was a pattern of increasing frequency and cover of native shrubs between 1994 and 2017, coupled with decreasing cover of native grasses. Succession from grasslands to tall shrublands is occurring in many grasslands. Recommendations include revising fire regimes. Preliminary findings of the effectiveness of an operational trial to investigate different management intervention strategies (fire and mechanical disturbance) are presented.

Tasmania's forests are highly valued for their exceptional biodiversity, including flora. Tasmania has 492 threatened flora species with around two thirds occurring in areas subject to forestry activities. The Forest Practices Authority (FPA) is Tasmania’s independent statutory body responsible for regulating forestry activities and administering the forest practices system. This includes the development of policies and tools to aid management of threatened species. Many of Tasmania’s threatened flora species are rare and cryptic so there is a lack of information on their distribution. This knowledge gap risks both type I and II errors when assessing species presence at a site of forestry activity. To fill this knowledge gap the FPA developed species distribution models for 49 of Tasmania’s most cryptic and at risk threatened flora species. The models were developed using MaxEnt, a program which uses an algorithm to model the relationship between species presence records and environmental characteristics. This results in a habitat suitability heat map which indicates the approximate relative likelihood that a given location will contain a species. These state-wide models form the basis of a new spatial planning tool that will be used to prioritise management decisions for threatened flora in timber production areas. Tools such as these models are important in the Tasmanian forestry context as they allow evaluation of both biodiversity conservation and timber production goals, and therefore aid in the sustainable management of natural resources and conservation of threatened flora.

The future viability of forests under climate change will depend on the adaptive capacity of trees to drought. Theoretically, genetic adaptation and phenotypic plasticity can enhance the ability to respond to climate change, however it remains unclear if trees can alter hydraulic traits to tolerate a future with more frequent and intense droughts. Here we explored the adaptive capacity of the tree species, Corymbia calophylla, through a common garden experiment with two populations, representing warm-dry and cool-wet climates, grown under well-watered and chronic water deficit conditions. We measured a suite of key hydraulic and allometric plant traits to parameterise a model (tcrit) to estimate the time from stomatal closure to critical hydraulic failure under severe drought (defined as the water potential with 88 % loss of hydraulic conductivity through the stem (P88)). The tcrit model was tested against observed critical failure in trees dried to P88. The warm-dry population exhibited plasticity in P88, differential relative water content between stomatal closure and P88 and minimum leaf conductance under contrasting water availability leading to an increase in both predicted and observed tcrit. This study highlights the importance of adaptive plasticity in enhancing resilience to climate change. It provides information on key traits that can improve vegetation models under future climate change scenarios.

Effective forest management and conservation require knowledge of the structure and composition of forest stands and how they change over time. Disturbances are important drivers of these forest stand dynamics, providing opportunities for recruitment, shifts in relative dominance of species, and changes in the trajectory of stand development especially in southeastern Australia. The type of disturbance, its intensity, and any interactions with previous disturbances all influence how individual species respond and will shape the post-disturbance development patterns. Forest structure has a substantial influence on plant community composition. The structure of vegetation plays a vital role in shaping biodiversity. The recruitment of target species in managed forests following harvesting is a crucial objective of sustainable forest management. The success or failure of managed forests in southeastern Australia is dependent on the density of Eucalyptus stems after stand establishment. We studied the influence of density on the diversity of the understorey species and found that light has bigger impact on the species composition of the forest rather than the density of the species.

Understanding how wildfire severity impacts ecosystem regeneration is fundamental to the management of fire-prone ecosystems. How might low versus moderate severity prescribed burns influence ecosystem function, and how do we identify when fire is "too severe"? We assessed the impacts of fire severity on plant and soil fungal communities across four vegetation types (karri forest, jarrah forest, riparian mixed forest and heathland) in a fire-prone region of southwest Australia, following a 98,000 ha mixed-severity wildfire. We undertook comprehensive flora surveys to determine plant species abundance and community structure, and extracted DNA from soil samples, amplifying the fungal ITS2 region, to estimate fungal diversity. Both low- and high-severity fire caused significant changes in the composition of heathland plant and fungal communities, which persisted for over three years post-fire. However, this depended on vegetation type. In karri and jarrah forests, plant and fungal composition was altered by high-severity fire, but unaffected by low-moderate severity fire. Riparian sites seemed relatively unaffected by fire severity in regards to plant and fungal community composition. These results demonstrate that plant communities and soil fungal communities exhibit similar post-fire regeneration trajectories. Furthermore, they suggest that a fire severity tolerance limit could exist for some of these fire-prone ecosystems, beyond which plant and fungal community composition may be changed. Future monitoring is critical to determine if these patterns and differences in community composition persist over time, and if fire severity has an impact on how quickly plant and fungal community composition and structure return to an unburnt state.