The Plant Life Of Western Australia South Of The Tropics

Written by former Director of King's Park Botanic Garden in Perth and leading botanical authority, this profusely illustrated study of plant life in Western Australia is structured in four main sections - the environment, the southwest province and southwestern interzone, the eremaean province and the northern province. Includes bibliographic information, a glossary and a detailed index.

"A thorough revision and expansion of Pate and Beard's Kwongan--Plant Life of the Sandplain (1984)"--Page 4 of cover.

Southwestern Australia is unique as it contains the world’s most nutrient-impoverished soils, experiences a prolonged-summer period and the vegetation is extremely fire-prone. It is also world-renowned for its relative high level of flora biodiversity. This book focuses on the diverse range of morphological and physiological adaptations evolved by the flora to survive in the harsh Mediterranean-type climate.

This data-rich book demonstrates the value of existing national long-term ecological research in Australia for monitoring environmental change and biodiversity. Long-term ecological data are critical for informing trends in biodiversity and environmental change. The Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN) is a major initiative of the Australian Government and one of its key areas of investment is to provide funding for a network of long-term ecological research plots around Australia (LTERN). LTERN researchers and other authors in this book have maintained monitoring sites, often for one or more decades, in an array of different ecosystems across the Australian continent – ranging from tropical rainforests, wet eucalypt forests and alpine regions through to rangelands and deserts. This book highlights some of the temporal changes in the environment that have occurred in the various systems in which dedicated field-based ecologists have worked. Many important trends and changes are documented and they often provide new insights that were previously poorly understood or unknown. These data are precisely the kinds of data so desperately needed to better quantify the temporal trajectories in the environment in Australia. By presenting trend patterns (and often also the associated data) the authors aim to catalyse governments and other organisations to better recognise the importance of long-term data collection and monitoring as a fundamental part of ecologically-effective and cost-effective management of the environment and biodiversity.

Australian vegetation has interested botanists and naturalists since Europeans first encountered Australia and its plant life. This 1994 edition of Australian Vegetation reviews the vegetation of the continent as a whole. In the introductory section, chapters on phytogeography, vegetation history and alien plants set the scene for further sections covering all the major vegetation types. The plant life of extreme Australian habitats is also discussed, and the book closes with a chapter on the conservation of Australian vegetation. Each chapter, written by experts on each particular habitat type, will inform and stimulate the interests of students and professional botanists, especially those fortunate enough to see for themselves the unique vegetation and flora of Australia.

Many libraries hold a number of titles in this series although only 6 have 1st ed. of this introduction to the works.

The Australian vegetation is the end result of a remarkable history of climate change, latitudinal change, continental isolation, soil evolution, interaction with an evolving fauna, fire and most recently human impact. This book presents a detailed synopsis of the critical events that led to the evolution of the unique Australian flora and the wide variety of vegetational types contained within it. The first part of the book details the past continental relationships of Australia, its palaeoclimate, fauna and the evolution of its landforms since the rise to dominance of the angiosperms at the beginning of the Cretaceous period. A detailed summary of the palaeobotanical record is then presented. The palynological record gives an overview of the vegetation and the distribution of important taxa within it, while the complementary macrofossil record is used to trace the evolution of critical taxa. This book will interest graduate students and researchers interested in the evolution of the flora of this fascinating continent.