Plant communities of Tasmanian wetlands

Abstract

The macrophytic vegetation of Tasmanian wetlands consists of forest, scrub, marginal herbland, tussock sedgeland, sedgeland, reed swamp and aquatic herbland. More than 80 taxa dominate or codominate in at least one division of at least one of the 530 wetlands from which data were obtained. Communities dominated by each of 16 of these taxa occur in 10 or more wetlands and vary in mean richness from 4 to 18 species, richness increasing towards the margins of wetlands, with the area of wetland, and with decreasing salinity. A combination of salinity and permanence indices explains over one-third of the floristic variation between these communities; within freshwater wetlands, pH has more influence than the permanence index. The Tasmanian wetland flora is a subset of that of mainland Australia. Most Tasmanian wetland plant communities probably occur on the Australian mainland. Many of the wetland vegetation types discriminated on the mainland do not occur in Tasmanian non-tidal wetlands.