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Great Western Woodlands Vegetation Structure Across Time Since Fire Chronosequence Data

This data contains vegetation cover, ground cover, tree density and stand basal area data across a multi-century time-since-fire sequence derived from growth ring-size relationships in fire-sensitive <em>Eucalyptus salubris</em> woodlands.

Simple

Identification info

Date (Creation)
2012-01-07
Date (Publication)
2023-04-19
Date (Revision)
2025-12-11
Edition
1.0

Identifier

Title
DataCite
Code
doi:10.25901/m19d-f050
Codespace
http://dx.doi.org

Publisher

Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network
Building 1019, 80 Meiers Rd
Indooroopilly
QLD
4068
Australia
+61 7 3365 9097

Author

CSIRO Land and Water (2014-2022) - Gosper, Carl ()
147 Underwood Avenue, Floreat, 6014, Western Australia, Australia
Floreat
Western Australia
6014
Australia

Co-author

CSIRO Land and Water (2014-2022) - Prober, Suzanne Mary (Senior Principal Research Scientist)
147 Underwood Avenue, Floreat, 6014, Western Australia, Australia
Floreat
Western Australia
6014
Australia

Co-author

CSIRO Land and Water (2014-2022) - Yates, Colin ()
147 Underwood Avenue, Floreat, 6014, Western Australia, Australia
Floreat
Western Australia
6014
Australia
Website
https://www.tern.org.au/

Purpose
Recurrent fire is a dominant disturbance in Mediterranean-climate landscapes. In infrequently-burnt communities, vegetation structure, habitat features and fuel availability can change over time-scales much longer than can be measured using contemporary remote-sensing approaches, creating challenges for conservation and fire management. The Great Western Woodlands (GWW) region of south-western Australia supports the world’s largest remaining area of Mediterranean-climate woodland, which in mosaic with mallee, shrublands and salt lakes cover an area of 160 000 km2. Eucalyptus woodlands in this region are typically fire-sensitive, and fire return intervals recorded over recent decades have been much shorter than the long-term average. This has led to considerable conservation concern regarding the loss of mature woodlands, and has highlighted a need to better understand how plant communities change with time since fire.
Credit
We at TERN acknowledge the Traditional Owners and Custodians throughout Australia, New Zealand and all nations. We honour their profound connections to land, water, biodiversity and culture and pay our respects to their Elders past, present and emerging.
Status
Completed

Point of contact

CSIRO Land and Water (2014-2022) - Gosper, Carl ()
147 Underwood Avenue, Floreat, 6014, Western Australia, Australia
147 Underwood Avenue
Floreat
Western Australia
6014
Australia
Topic category
  • Biota
  • Environment

Extent

Description
The Great Western Woodlands site was established in 2012 on Credo Station, 110 km NNW of Kalgoorlie, WA.
N
S
E
W


Temporal extent

Time period
2012-01-07 2012-01-12
Maintenance and update frequency
Not planned
GCMD Science Keywords
  • VEGETATION
  • TERRESTRIAL ECOSYSTEMS
  • ECOSYSTEMS
  • FORESTS
ANZSRC Fields of Research
  • Ecology
  • Community ecology (excl. invasive species ecology)
  • Fire ecology
  • Forest ecosystems
  • Forestry fire management
  • Forestry management and environment
  • Population ecology
TERN Platform Vocabulary
  • Great Western Woodlands
TERN Parameter Vocabulary
  • stem density
  • Number per Hectare
  • stand basal area
  • Square Metre per Hectare
QUDT Units of Measure
  • Number per Hectare
  • Square Metre per Hectare
GCMD Horizontal Resolution Ranges
  • 500 meters - < 1 km
GCMD Temporal Resolution Ranges
  • one off
Keywords (Discipline)
  • Ecological fire management
  • Fire interval
  • Space-for-time
  • Succession
  • GWW
  • Great Western Woodlands

Resource constraints

Use limitation
The Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license allows others to copy, distribute, display, and create derivative works provided that they credit the original source and any other nominated parties. Details are provided at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
File name
88x31.png
File description
CCBy Logo from creativecommons.org
File type
png
Linkage
https://w3id.org/tern/static/cc-by/88x31.png

Title
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence
Alternate title
CC-BY
Edition
4.0
Website
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Access constraints
License
Use constraints
Other restrictions
Other constraints
TERN services are provided on an "as-is" and "as available" basis. Users use any TERN services at their discretion and risk. They will be solely responsible for any damage or loss whatsoever that results from such use including use of any data obtained through TERN and any analysis performed using the TERN infrastructure. <br />Web links to and from external, third party websites should not be construed as implying any relationships with and/or endorsement of the external site or its content by TERN. <br /><br />Please advise any work or publications that use this data via the online form at https://www.tern.org.au/research-publications/#reporting
Other constraints
Please cite this dataset as {Author} ({PublicationYear}). {Title}. {Version, as appropriate}. Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network. Dataset. {Identifier}.
Other constraints
Please note: This data has been migrated “as is” from TERN’s SuperSite data portal. Minimal quality assessment has been applied to this data. Please contact the dataset authors for queries regarding the data

Resource constraints

Classification
Unclassified

Distribution Information

Distribution format
  • NetCDF

Distributor

Distributor

Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network
Building 1019, 80 Meiers Rd
Indooroopilly
QLD
4068
Australia
OnLine resource
GWW_vegetation_structure_across_fire_chronosequence_data

Distribution Information

Distribution format
  • NetCDF

Distributor

Distributor

Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network
Building 1019, 80 Meiers Rd
Indooroopilly
QLD
4068
Australia
OnLine resource
GWW_vegetation_structure_across_fire_chronosequence_data_dictionary

Distribution Information

Distribution format

Distributor

Distributor

Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network
Building 1019, 80 Meiers Rd, Indooroopilly, QLD, Australia, 4068
Indooroopilly
QLD
4068
Australia
OnLine resource
ro-crate-metadata.json

Resource lineage

Statement
Vegetation and ground surface cover sampling<br>At each site, two 50 m transects were established along north and west sides of the 50 x 50 m plot and a 70 m transect was placed diagonally through the centre starting in the north-west corner. Along these transects, 50 vertical point placements were made with a 12.5 mm diameter pole, extendable to 3 m in height, marked in 10 cm increments. Intercepts were sampled at 3 m intervals; 16 along each side and 18 on the diagonal. At each pole placement we recorded the presence or absence of an intercept between the pole and any vegetation in the following height classes: 0-12, 12-25 and 50-100 cm, and 1-2, 2-4, 4-10 and > 10 m. The presence/absence of intercepts with vegetation greater than 4 m in height was visually estimated, with the height of any intercepted vegetation checked using a hypsometer (Nikon Forestry 550). Intercepts with live and dead vegetation (entirely dead plants or dead limbs, but not individual dead leaves on otherwise live limbs) were recorded separately but note that the data provided here is total vegetation cover including intercepts with both live and dead vegetation. Point placements which did not intercept any vegetation are termed ‘foliar gaps’. At each of the 50 point placements, ground cover was recorded by placing the pole 1 m perpendicularly to each side of the transect. At each point (n = 100) ground cover was recorded as being either ‘ground fuel’, ‘bare’ (including rock) or ‘cryptogam’ based on the dominant cover type (if multiple types were present) under the pole intercept. All dead vegetation on the ground surface was classed as ground fuel, so includes shed leaves, twigs, buds, fruits, bark, branches and logs. Cryptogam cover was based on a visual field assessment of the presence or absence of soil crust organisms, including moss, lichens and cyanobacteria. In cases where ground cover placements intercepted live vegetation, the ground surface under foliage was recorded.Intercept counts were converted to a single value for the proportion of intercepts per layer/ground cover class per site.<br>Tree density and size sampling<br>Tree size data was collected by sampling 16 trees by use of a modified version of the point-centred quarter method. Diameter at D10 of trunks was measured along with the distance from the corner of the nearest tree in each of the four compass quadrants radiating from the four corners of each plot. D10 was used rather than breast height owing to the low, multiple-branching habit of <em>Eucalyptus salubris</em>. From these measurements, tree density per site and mean cross-sectional area per tree was calculated. Total basal area per site was calculated by multiplying mean cross-sectional area per tree by tree density.
Hierarchy level
Dataset

Reference System Information

Reference system identifier
EPSG/EPSG:4326

Reference system type
Geodetic Geographic 2D

Metadata

Metadata identifier
urn:uuid/06636cbe-7afa-4cdc-85ab-c26a76060385

Title
TERN GeoNetwork UUID

Language
English
Character encoding
UTF8

Point of contact

Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network
Building 1019, 80 Meiers Rd
Indooroopilly
QLD
4068
Australia
+61 7 3365 9097

Type of resource

Resource scope
Dataset
Metadata linkage
https://geonetwork.tern.org.au/geonetwork/srv/eng/catalog.search#/metadata/06636cbe-7afa-4cdc-85ab-c26a76060385

Point-of-truth metadata URL

Date info (Creation)
2023-04-19T00:00:00.000000+00:00
Date info (Revision)
2025-12-11T22:46:06.942967+00:00

Metadata standard

Title
ISO 19115-1:2014/AMD 1:2018 Geographic information - Metadata - Fundamentals
Edition
1

Metadata standard

Title
ISO/TS 19115-3:2016
Edition
1.0

Metadata standard

Title
ISO/TS 19157-2:2016
Edition
1.0
Title
Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN) Metadata Profile of ISO 19115-3:2016 and ISO 19157-2:2016
Date (published)
2021
Edition
1.0

Identifier

Code
10.5281/zenodo.5652221
Website
https://github.com/ternaustralia/TERN-ISO19115/releases/tag/v1.0

 
 

Overviews

Spatial extent

N
S
E
W


Keywords

ANZSRC Fields of Research
Community ecology (excl. invasive species ecology) Ecology Fire ecology Forest ecosystems Forestry fire management Forestry management and environment Population ecology
GCMD Science Keywords
ECOSYSTEMS FORESTS TERRESTRIAL ECOSYSTEMS VEGETATION

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