Really great point. For a few trips I’m hoping to bring in one of my friends who used to work at a herbarium and regularly collects specimens, he’s bound to spot things I haven’t got my eye in for yet.
Yeah I think I’ll need to pitch my initial efforts/paper as preliminary, with the proviso that sampling is ongoing and may uncover more things. I’ve found a couple of endangered plant species in there so far, including one which is particularly threatened and wasn’t considered threatened at all at the time of the original survey (and was actually even listed as semi-common), so definitely an impetus to get some data out relatively soon to try boost protections.
Yeah, with a golf course, sporting fields, and factories on 3 sides of the reserve, this is definitely the case.
That paper is my Bible at the moment! His original 1979 list was never formally published, so the author of this paper attached it as typed appendix, which has been a lifesaver.
Without knowing more about the location (or about fire), I don’t know, but would organizing a controlled burn be beneficial for the ecology of the site? I know some ecosystems need regular fires and some are harmed by them. Other variables would also make a difference for whether it’s feasible or not I assume.
I think that would definitely be an interesting exercise, but given there are sporting fields to the south, a golf course to the east, major road to the north, and factories to the west, I think the chances are very slim, too much vested interest in human land use.
But with teams of trained firefighters it can be done. Perhaps in sections year by year. Cape Town does, our fynbos (like California) needs fire. Then bulbs and orchids and annuals take their turn.
Great that you are doing this. There are so few thorough inventories done these days and even fewer published. Bioblitzes are great and so are transects and plots, but they are not the same as a complete inventory. As Susan and others suggested, it can take years and a sustained energy level. And a vouchered inventory of a large area costs a lot of money.
This year, I co-authored an inventory of New York City’s Central Park. See link below for Open Access (just look for the pdf link on the BioOne page). Our goal was a complete inventory of all the wild vascular plant species growing in the Park. in 341 ha we found 438 species.
We used a modified timed-meander method, which is really just to say sort of random but thorough search over the whole area.
All floras are dynamic and the time element is rarely explicitly considered. We chose a three year period to capture seasonal and climatic variation as was mentioned here by others.
We also tried to identify all the unique niche areas and visit all of them at least a few times in every season. Few places in Central Park are natural communities, but there are a lot of unique niches like the sand barrens of irrigated baseball fields that harbor wet sand-loving species like Sagina rosea in the Pink Family.
Also important is to have more eyes on the ground. Bring in a Sedge specialist or a Grass specialist and they will find new things.
Bottom line answer: We did not keep a chart of species over time to plot the asymptote, but when we quit finding new things on repeated visits to different areas, we figured we were there or very close. Of course, the day the flora was published we found something new. Nature keeps her own schedule.
I was going to ask how many golf-ball-fruits you have found lying around - especially near the eastern edge where the habitat seems suitable for them. :)
Great to see you doing this but also sad that in a big city there are so few other people in there making iNat records. [Its difficult to tell as there is no defined Place for the reserve - when I saw your link initially I thought you were the only one but then realized it was a restricted Project.]
In a nearby significant 70ha reserve a botanist recorded 387 plant species but I still found another later. The reserve is significant for orchid diversity - I think I have about 55 species but combining all the historic data there are 94 species. Quite a few of those are misidentified though and there are some unusual varieties mentioned that may have become named species later but I have no proper idea of what they meant (i.e. duplication). Most of the list was generated after the Ash Wednesday fires, the last time a natural fire occurred there). It was popular with orchid enthusiasts but interestingly Pyrorchis nigricans was not recorded then, a species that flowers almost exclusively after a summer fire. However about 10-15 years ago we found two colonies (leaves only). I suspect their seeds were brought in to the reserve accidentally by orchid enthusiasts visiting places where Pyrorchis nigricans had flowered and seeds were transported on shoes, clothing or vehicles. Also on the list was Corybas diemenicus but I didn’t see any until the 4th season I spent there because I just wasn’t looking in the right areas - now I know its the most common and widespread of the 5 helmet-orchids there! The thing with terrestrial orchids is they are very difficult to find if not flowering and, as mentioned already, small herbaceous plants are particularly dependent on seasonal climates.
No doubt you will continue to find new things, I guess those small herbs will be hardest to find. You have done really well to find so much not even in a full season.
So cool, much appreciated! I’ll definitely cite this in my paper. And yeah, I think inventories are very underrated/undervalued, especially for conservation implications
Apart from @joelp and a couple of odd others, very few iNatters in southwest Sydney.
I’ve had the same for a few species in this reserve; thought I’d never find them at first, then I found one, now I can’t stop finding them.
Yeah, I think the last main groups left for me:
the eucalypts
few bottlebrushes I’m waiting to flower
the tiny herbs I’ll have to scour the leaf litter for
a few grasses that don’t have flowering material yet
There are probably still a few obvious things I’m missing that I just need to stumble on the right spot. Got two new weed species today that so far are just a single individual each in the whole reserve.
They weren’t in the original survey, but I’ve been trying to record at the very least the most common things. I suspect I’m missing most of the diversity though having no experience in looking for/recognising mosses, and some that I have found need microscopic examination to ID unfortunately
It’s never late to start looking for them! I bet there’re plenty of species that can be ided with macroscopic features, though yes, without microscope it’s tough and harder to learn differences, but if you’re really into that work I bet school microscopes are not expensive and easy to work with.
haha I’ve been resisting saying that, really, if you want to record ALL life you can spend several lifetimes just looking at a few scoops of water… I think Thomas is more focused on plants in this question, though…
Just noticed this thread, great project. Something you might like to consider especially if your aim is to publish your results, would be to establish some permanent quadrats/transects that become your main point of focus and then any other species found outside of these become incidental observations within the study, using this method you could include plants, birds, insects etc. I set up a stratified random sample using quadrats on a 1,000ha property in the 90’s and with this method I found 80% of the shrub species that had been recorded on the property. From random walks around this property, over a 5 year period I was always adding new species to my list, especially orchids. Over the last eight years I have been surveying the same location once a week, I am gathering data on flowering phenology and climate. During a recent survey, I came across a Diuris sp. that I hadn’t seen in flower since 2014 and some other species didn’t start flowering until after a recent controlled burn. In short, you can never be sure when your list will be complete. The main reason for using the quadrat/transect approach would be to allow someone to return to the site in future years and repeat your methodology. Prior to the fire that went through my current survey area was conducted, I surveyed a 16ha area focussing on the shrub species and two years after the fire I was able to repeat my methodology and compare my results and assess how the frequency of each species had changed after the fire. The journal Cunninghamia has a number of papers that might be of interest https://www.rbgsyd.nsw.gov.au/getmedia/69d14cc9-6edb-482b-9893-0f4fddfcaca6/Cun9Hun275.pdf.aspx . Hope this is of some assistance.
Given the small size of my reserve (15 hectares), how would you go about setting up/deciding on size for quadrats? I feel like too large and they become somewhat redundant and just fulfil the same role as my current entire reserve survey, but too small and they obviously don’t achieve much.
When you look at a number of different research papers for this type of survey, people will use anything from 50mx20m, 30x30m, 20x20m, or 100m by 2m transect, 1mx1m and various other methods. It depends on the vegetation and topography, you may not want to walk around a 20mx20m quadrat in dense vegetation a line transect might be better. If you decide it is worth using quadrats it might be worth getting in contact with the organisation that manages the site to see whether you need permission to conduct a survey at this location. The timing of the survey could be monthly, bi-monthly or seasonal but the main thing with surveying vegetation is that the quadrats need to be randomly located, stratified random sampling is a good method to look up. This article has a method for working out the size of the quadrat, you could start with 1m2, 4m2 up to 400m2 or more if needed.
Hope this is of some assistance, I suppose the main thing with surveying vegetation is to use the smallest amount of quadrats that give you the most information, maybe someone else in the forum might be able to assist in this area.
If you are surveying off-trail, perhaps the point at which to stop is that when you believe the damage done by surveying (trampling vegetation) outweighs the benefits of finding the harder to find species.