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Conservation Officer’s report – Dan Clarke

By Dan Clarke

The following report first appeared in the APS NSW 2020 Annual Report.

I volunteered to be the primary editor to expand the plant profile database on the APS NSW website. These profiles are the most visited pages on our website! This year, various authors, primarily Jeff Howes, Heather Miles and Rhonda Daniels drafted approximately 200 native plant profiles, with a focus on how to grow the plants in the garden as well as how to identify them. Editing continues with over 130 finalised and uploaded onto the website.

Monitoring works for Prostanthera densa as part of the Saving our Species program continued throughout 2020. The exciting news here regards attempts, since 2016, to relocate a collection record of Prostanthera densa made in 1972. Details for this record were very general in nature and have not been verified since this time. As luck would have it, APS Sutherland member, Paul Rendell, found the plants in this general area whilst leisurely bushwalking in August 2020! It would seem that this is the long-lost location of the 1972 record and a volunteer survey was done with APS NSW members and myself in September 2020. I am incredibly happy that this mystery has been solved and an additional population of plants has been verified.

I wrote an article on bushfires and the categories of plant responses and regeneration mechanisms for Australians Plants. Complementing this were two submissions to the State Inquiry into NSW Bushfires and the Royal Commission into National Natural Disasters Arrangement (Bushfires 2019-2020).

Before and 12 months after bushfire at Kurri Kurri, Hunter Valley, image H Miles

 

Submissions made by District Groups

  • Hunter Valley – Landscape and vegetation plan for the Maitland Hospital Grounds
  • North Shore – Ku-ring-gai Council’s Plan of Management for the St Ives Showground and precincts
  • Nowra – Horses in Kosciusko, Development at Huskisson
  • Southern Highlands – Wingecarribee Shire Council regarding the fate of a very large Eucalyptus macarthurii
  • Parramatta and Hills – The Hills Shire Council on their proposed Landscape Management Plan for Fred Caterson Reserve in Castle Hill.