BIOLOGICAL INVENTORY FOR CONSERVATION EVALUATION - IV - COMPOSITION, DISTRIBUTION AND SPATIAL PREDICTION OF VEGETATION ASSEMBLAGES IN SOUTHERN AUSTRALIA

Data on the floristics of the vegetation collected as part of a system atic, stratified regional survey of birds in the open Eucalyptus fores ts of south east Australia, were used to investigate the composition a nd distribution of vegetation assemblages across the region, and the e xtent to which associations between plant species could be used to pre dict the potential species complement of unsampled areas of the region . One hundred and ninety-three plant species were recorded in the open Eucalyptus forests in this study. These comprised 22 tree overstorey species, 46 tree understorey species, 114 shrub and herbaceous species , and 11 ground cover species from approximately 106 genera, Broad tre nds in the distribution of vegetation assemblages were associated with perceived elevation and soil moisture/nutrient gradients across the s tudy region. BIOCLIM provided a means of characterising these broad tr ends in the distribution of vegetation assemblages by defining climati c envelopes for clusters of sites. Of the variables used to define the se climatic envelopes, temperature variables were the most useful in d iscriminating between groups of sites. However, only a limited number of discrete assemblages of plants associated with groups of sites coul d be used for predicting the occurrence of vegetation assemblages in u nsampled areas in the landscape. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V.