Plant diversity

Following on from my initial foray into what is held by the Atlas of Living Australia for the Mallacoota area (defined by me as within 5km of our house) I decided to look at which areas had good numbers of records and/or species of plants.  I did this separately for monocots and dicots and got similar patterns and in what follows will only refer to dicots.

There are 543 localities with at least 1 dicot species reported.  435  of these have exactly 1 species!  32 localities have 10 or more species.  The locality names of the major sites are generally not helpful:

These are all research site by Victorian Government bodies.  On looking up the latitude and longitude given for each site the top one (excluding the null entry) in the list turns out to be Shady Gully, right on the edge of the town.  I then found a few more sites with variations on the name Shady Gully and adding them all together got 113 dicots, 52 monocots and 5 ferns. 

With luck, and trusting in Google, this should be a link to the species list.

Diversity in Mallacoota - as revealed by the Atlas of Living Australia

Stimulated by a Facebook post about diversity in the Mallacoota area I have extracted some of the records for the area held in the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA).  What follows is a very summary analysis of those records.

For simplicity and as a starting point I used the "Explore Your Area" function in ALA, seeking information for a 5km area around our house.  The Atlas gives a nice map of the area with reportoing sites marked in it.

 I downloaded the file of records.  This was quite large (~5Mb in a zip file, expanding to an EXCEL file of some 39Mb when unzipped).  As it contains 57,008 records that isn't surprising.  I cut out quite a few columns as being things of no interest to me and got the file down to 10 Mb which I uploaded to ACCESS.

My first attempt was to look at the number of records by Class (equivalent to birds, reptiles etc.) That got messy as the plant taxonomists have made a completely confusing mess of their element at the class level  However there was a helpful summary on the ALA page.

Those headings are pretty useful for a layman. 

I have then tried to calculate the number of records rather than the number of species.

In what follows I have highlighted the problems I have encountered in doing so.  I stress that these were not fatal to my project: I just had to do a bit of work.  The ALA in particular were very helpful with this.

Calculating number of records by species group.

This turned out to be "interesting" since the download file doesn't contain these species groups and I couldn't work out how to get the equivalents in all cases:

• Some were easy to line up (eg Birds = Class Aves);
• Some were going to be difficult (eg Crustacea is a mixture of classes; splitting plants into monocots etc); and 
• I'd never heard of Chromista!  (It emerges this is a new(ish Kingdom essentially of photosynthetic algae.  Reading the wiki about this species group illustrates the problem of stability at the cutting edge of science.)

With assistance from the Atlas staff I managed to get a concordance worked out.

There were also a few other issues

• The totals shown in that table do not in all cases equal the sum of the (cited) totals (eg Athropods doesn't equal the sum of Crustaceans and Insects - I think the difference is spiders).  Again I have been able to sort this out;
• Some groups, with small numbers of species and/or records were not listed above.  They are few in number and include groups such as polychaete worms - ie the hairy things one digs up for bait - cephalopods (eg squid and octopus) and jellyfish. I have grouped them together as as "other marine invertebrates".
• Not all records in the ALA have a complete taxonomic tree, and as a result of my consequent actions my totals differ from those offered by the Atlas.  No biggie, but this must be noted if comparing the table above with what follows:
• In some cases taxa are only identified to order, family or genus.  For my purposes I wanted species so deleted the incomplete records.
• In other cases what looked like "Good" species didn't have the higher levels.  This mainly seemed to flow from the personality conflicts evident in orchid taxonomy. As I was able to work out which species group the records related to I have included them.

Results

At the most summary level I have recognised 7 groups

 For a little more detail these 22 groups illustrate the number of species (a good measure of diversity) and the number of records (a measure of observer effort).

Discussion

I see it as rather remarkable that within 5 kms of our house 1,972 species of living entities have been recorded.  From my major personal interests 297 species of birds in such a small area, in a temperate climate, is almost beyond belief.

As we are now living here I shall be trying my best to identify and record in the Atlas species of groups other than birds.  This might get a large kick along when members of the Australian Native plants Society come on a field trip later in the year.

As well as these big picture numbers I have also got a lot of material to form the basis of field lists for plants, fungi and insects.  Personally I always find it helpful to have a list of possibles as a starting point: that gives things to look for in field guides and reference materials.  If anyone else wants a copy of my lists I'm happy to send them.

As well as the lists of species the Atlas also includes details of the locations where records were made.  In total there are ~1500 locations listed: this is an artefact of

• people defining locality names as they choose; and
• databases being databases and regarding trivial differences in naming (eg Smiths is different to Smith's) as relating to different places.  By way of example in an initial scan of the localities I have found 9 "different" names all clearly  referring to the Mallacoota Recycled Water Plant!

It is significant that 795 of the locations have only a single record!  Only 49 locations have more than 100 records!  I shall try to work out something that identifies the true hotspots for various species groups.

Indoors and outdoors

In my previous life at Carwoola I did very little with the indoor readings from my weather station.  At Mallacoota our new house has felt a lot milder than outside so I thought I would have an initial look at how indoors and outdoors compared.

I had difficulty persuading EXCEL to give a graph with dates along the x axis and showing hourly values.  However the diurnal cycle is pretty obvious.

Looking at temperatures first, ...

 ... several conclusions come to mind. 

• The range of temperatures is far less indoors than out;
• Basically its pleasantly warm indoors, avoiding nasty heat spikes on hot days;
• The range of temperatures drops considerably after the 16th, with us away from home and the shutters down on the North-facing deck.

Looking now at humidity.

• Again the indoor values are much more constant than the outdoors;
• Night-time humidity in particular is a lot lower indoors than out.
• There doesn't seem to be such a marked difference due to our absence.

My Weather Station is working

I have now set up my weather station (a Davis Vantage Vue).  Its in the back yard and aligned so that it points just to the right of Mount Imlay (which I reckon is as close to North as I am going to get.

  I have been running it for the last 18 hours.  That isn't really long enough to make any big calls about quality, but comparing it (red X below) with the BoM station for Mallacoota (out near the airport - yellow pin) ..

... suggests that the data isn't too far off.

Here is a photo of the BoM station.  The pylon in the background is something to do with the airport (on the far side of the trees even further back).

Hourly temperatures have a correlation coefficient of 0.98.

 As does Humidity.

The wind readings show a bit more difference, in the speed of the gusts at a point in time with  and the average difference between the two values is about one third of the BoM value. Such a difference  would be expected when comparing sites in rather different locations.  Mine is behind a house and about 2.7km from the coast while the BoM site is in the middle of a cleared paddock about 100m from the coast!

The pattern of relative speeds is very similar and correlation coefficient is still quite high at 0.92.   I conclude that my data will be good enough to say that time period "n" was relatively windy or calm.

A change comes through

Today (12/2/19) was pretty warm in the early afternoon.  As we left Eden about 1pm the car thermometer read 35^oC.

A couple of hours later I was at Captain Stevensons Point where it felt a good bit cooler and windier.  This was evident in the whitecaps out to sea together with about 12 Gannets fishing inshore (only 1 in the photo).

 There was also a huge - my estimate was 1,000 birds flock of shearwaters (they seemed very dark so possibly Short-tailed or Wedge-tailed Shearwaters but they were about 1km away so I settled for Shearwater sp).

The water in the seaward part of the Inlet was also very rough, leading the Pelicans to hunker down

 The change in the weather is well summarised by readings from the BoM site in Mallacoota.

• A maximum temperature of 32.3^oC at 1300hrs dropping to 18.5^oC by 1600 hrs.
• Maximum wind gust of 69kph at 1530.

Bastion Point 11 February 2019

Quite a few interesting birds around on the dunes of Bastion Point today.  The blue line is our route and the underlying image is from some time ago.

All the sandbars in the middle of the Inlet are now underwater.

So are some of the dunes on the seaward side of the Inlet, which made nice habitat for the birds.

There were even a few flowers on the vegetation holding the small hummocks together.

The obvious sight was a large flock of Crested Terns (53) and Silver Gulls (~100).

Behind the big flock (and a Great Cormorant) were some Little Terns.  My high count was 11 of this species, and there could have been more are they became quite active with several birds in the air and others on the ground.

I believe this to be a juvenile from the reduced black on the head.

Here are half the large waders: I believe them to be Bar-tailed Godwits.

An adult Red-capped Plover.

I got quite excited about this bird as it seemed to be performing a distraction display (which implies it has a nest).

However when it posed nicely it was clearly "only" a juvenile Red-capped Plover.

There were 6 Red-necked Stints feeding on the waters edge.

The full eBird checklist is here.  The unphotographed birds of interest were 3 Australian Gannets, fishing well out to sea and a White-fronted Chat which briefly appeared on top of some reeds.

Getting some Baseline data

One of the issues we have found in our looking at 'stuff' around the area is the difficulty of getting lists of what is already recorded.  It is OK for birds as eBird does what is needed there but for plants, insects or reptiles there is nothing.

Parks Victoria don't seem to have an office in the area - or at least not one that is open to the public and certainly don't have any species lists.  I have got some great help (about bats and a Swamp Rat) from a Ranger, but he is from Orbost and not based in Mallacoota.

I came across a mob called Naturemap (a derivative of Canberra Nature Map - with which I have some philosophical problems).  However they seem to have very little available unless one signs up to the operation.  One of my philosophies is not to give personal details until I know what the activity is on about.  Another is that they seem to be very strong on new-age hippy bullshit about respecting this that and the other.  I asked them a few questions and haven't got an answer after a week so I am ignoring them.

The Atlas of Living Australia appears to have come up with the goods in the form of 57,000 records for an area of 5km radius around our house.  It was a large file -~5mb download which unzipped to about 30Mb.  I have removed a number of fields of interest only to serious scientists and then uploaded it to an ACCESS database.  (About 2000 records didn't upload because people had put an 'X' in the individual count field but I don't think that will  be important so have just used the remaining ~55,000 records.)

The catalyst for this was seeing a pair of skinks interacting on the deck and wondering what they were.  By querying my file I find that there are 23 species of reptile recorded in the area, of which 7 are skinks. I shall take some snaps and try to ID them.

I am fairly confident this is Lampropholis guichenoti Pale-flecked Garden Sunskink.  A field guide also calls it the Common Garden Skink, which is appropriate as every one I looked at seemed to be this species.

Land Animal sightings, February 2019

I shall eventually submit these to the Atlas of Living Australia.  (I had wondered about using the Atlas of the Wilderness Coast but the organisers of that have not responded to a few simple questions I asked them so I can take a hint!)

Lace Monitor (aka  Goanna):  

• Frances saw one between Genoa Rd and Karbeethong on 2 February'
• A large one walked across the paddock below Angophora Drive on 6 February

Grey-headed Fruit bat:

• 4 seen flying over Karbeethong on 2 February.
• Occasional calls heard from the rainforest on Mullet Creek

Swamp Rat

• Seen several days early in the morning at the lagoon boardwalk

Eastern Grey Kangaroo

• End of Lagoon boardwalk 9 February

January 2019 Weather

I originally posted these comments on the Mallacoota Birds Facebook page but thought they'd be a good opener for this blog.

Birds are affected by the weather, so here are a few thoughts about the January weather in Mallacoota as compiled by BoM,.

First up, it was a lot more pleasant than in Canberra!

Secondly, some comparisons with means:

• Rainfall - 45.2 mm vs average since 1975 of 64.4
• Average Max Temp - 25.9^oC vs average since 1994 of 24.4^oC.
• Average Min Temp - 17.6^oC vs average since 1994 of 15.7^oC.