Tasmania - CRA/RFA - Forests - National Estate - Flora Species / Community Richness

In the context of Australia as a whole, Tasmania, as a region, is not regarded as exceptionally diverse for most floral groups. This pattern is consistent with the usual tropical-temperate diversity shift seen in most parts of the world. On a regional basis, however, some areas are obviously significant in terms of flora species richness.

All sites in this coverage are classified according to National Estate criterion A3: Importance in exhibiting unusual richness or diversity of flora, fauna, landscapes or cultural features

The assessment for this criterion was divided into two areas of analysis: the richness of flora species and the richness of forest communities. Species-level richness is often referred to as alpha (a), or within-area, diversity and is usually measured as the number of species occurring within an area of a given size. Forest community richness is effectively a surrogate measure of the rate of change of species: a between-area, or beta (b) diversity, measure. It is often a good reflection of environmental diversity, where strong gradients produce rapid transitions of different forest communities and their associated species.

This database is a digital polygon coverage of Tasmania (captured at 1:500 000 scale) detailing sites with a high flora species or community richness. Species richness and community richness of flora are coded with a unique number, the relevant National Estate values and criteria, and cleared land status.

This is an archived dataset jointly owned by the Commonwealth and the Tasmanian Governments under the Tasmania-Commonwealth Regional Forest Agreement (RFA) data agreement of 8th November 1997.This data is available to the public under licence from the Department as part of the Commonwealth Spatial Data Access and Pricing Policy.

Any reproduction of this dataset must carry the following statement: Copyright Commonwealth of Australia and Tasmanian Government 1998. Departmental Deed