Talk by Tony Maxwell on Proactive Plant Conservation

Talk by Tony Maxwell on Proactive Plant Conservation Tony has been the creator over many years of a wonderful comprehensive database of NSW native plant species with their occurrences listed region by region. His spreadsheets have such headings as Scientific name, common name, family, whether found in rainforest, the plant’s form i.e. tree, shrub, climber etc and the plant’s status in an area, i.e. whether the species is threatened, vulnerable, critically endangered etc. He has gathered information so far on 5,698 different species in 147 areas he has divided NSW into eg North East Coast, South East Coast, Sydney North etc. He has gathered this information from a variety of sources such as local Councils, NPWS National Park Plantlists and local APS groups. 

The emphasis of Tony’s talk to us was on rare and threatened plants, highlighting their existence and management. Tony is keen for APS groups to gather and provide more information on occurrences of rare and threatened plants in the course of their activities. 

He finds his data sheets very handy for quickly being able to give information on occurrences of rare and threatened plants in specific areas by easy manipulation of the data. Tony believes it is important to know small areas well first in order to gain an overall understanding of what rare and threatened species exist in the big picture ie a bottom up approach. An example was given: for the Sydney Northern National Parks knowing how many Grevillea caleyi actual plants can be found in each of Berowra Valley, Ku-ring-gai, Lane Cove, Marramarra and Muogamurra National Parks.

When plants are known to be particularly threatened, how do we go about giving them the best chance of continuing to exist? Propagation and then distribution to the public was discussed but it was pointed out that there are legal hurdles to overcome first, often with NPWS laws that make this difficult at present. It was very clear from Tony’s talk that he has a strong commitment to spreading the word that we do all we can to ensure the protection of rare native plants. He has certainly been doing his bit with great commitment as is evidenced by his tireless work over many years in collecting the amazingly huge amounts of data on our native plants, rare as well as otherwise.