Preventing extinction for New England endemic plants

Method steps

1. We targeted plant species that were suggested as potentially at risk due to the 2019-2020 fires along with additional rare taxa known to occur in similar environments (https://www.environment.gov.au/biodiversity/bushfire-recovery/bushfire-impacts/priority-plants). The method of adaptive random meanders was used. Many of the target taxa were known to be restricted to granite outcrops and rock pavements. Due to this known bias in distribution of some target taxa the random meanders prioritised visiting rock pavements, outcrops and wetlands within the vicinity of the search paths; however, all habitats were searched between target habitats during searches. In total 20 random meanders were undertaken across the range of environments found within the reserves and these were undertaken between October 2020 and July 2021. Once a population was found, general and rapid estimates were made of population size, demography, health and phenology. We used the free mobile and web application Epicollect5 (https://five.epicollect.net/) to enable mobile phone-based data collection. The method necessarily is designed to cover as many locations and populations as possible within a limited time at the expense of high quality and thus act as a first assessment survey technique.