Field Botany (BOTA30006)

This subject is structured around the fieldwork in early February and covers the basic skills that are required to undertake a field-based botanical activity such as a flora survey or an environmental impact assessment, or to proceed to research in a field-based botanical discipline. Topics to be covered include:

• taxonomy of the Australian flora;
• field identification of major families and genera of plants;
• collection and preservation of plant specimens; mounting and cataloguing specimens; curatorial skills; nomenclature;
• techniques for description and classification of vegetation; structural types, floristic associations, measures of abundance (cover, density, basal area, biomass), sampling techniques (quadrats, line transects, plotless methods), sampling scale and species-area relationships, profile diagrams, life-form spectra;
• soils; and
• vegetation mapping.