Dr Douglas and an assistant were engaged by the Upper Blue Mountains office of the NPWS to establish flora and soil monitoring plots in the southwestern Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area. These plots entail recording all plant species in a 400m2 sample, with additional tree species recorded in the adjoining 20×30 extension.
The work is essentially the same as a BAM plot (20×50) but adds soil sampling, tree diameters classes by species, and a point-intercept transect intended to indicate vegetation structure. We were later engaged to resurvey another consultant’s plots where the NPWS had detected that the information that had been collected was incomplete or incorrect.
We found many more plant species in those plots than the previous consultant had detected, even though we surveyed in late winter after a particularly harsh season that had includes several snow falls in these high elevation sites. We also found rare or threatened flora that had been missed, and we made several opportunistic sightings of threatened bird specie
