The dataset can be reused for contintental-wide synthesis of the cover of Australian grasses. It consists of high quality, well-described plot-based data extracted from TERN repository on 13/3/2014. The data includes vegetation records for the Poaceae family from the following dataset: ABARES Ground Cover Reference Sites Database, Biological Survey of South Australia - Vegetation Survey, Biological Database of South Australia, Corveg (Queensland), TERN AusPlots Rangelands Survey Program, Biological Survey of the Ravensthorpe Range (Western Australia).The entire content of the portal was initially extracted using the portal's download feature to obtain the full extent of available data for the following all datasets. These data were loaded into a PostgreSQL database. Subsequently, a SQL query was built for each of the cited datasets which produced a flat table containing information about the survey name, site identifier, visit date, coordinates, species, abundance, biomass and/or cover class, filtering on species of the Poaceae family using a genus list obtained from the website of the Atlas of Living Australia (
http://www.ala.org.au/).
Credit
We at TERN acknowledge the Traditional Owners and Custodians throughout Australia, New Zealand and all nations. We honour their profound connections to land, water, biodiversity and culture and pay our respects to their Elders past, present and emerging. The dataset is derived from the following datasets which are publicly available from portal.aekos.org.au: Ground Cover Reference Sites Database (ABARES), Biological Survey of South Australia - Vegetation Survey, Biological Survey of South Australia - Vegetation Survey, Biological Database of South Australia (Department of Environment, Water and Natural Resources), Corveg (Queensland Department of Science, Information Technology, Innovation and the Arts)), Rangelands Survey Program (TERN AusPlots), Biological Survey of the Ravensthorpe Range (Department of Parks and Wildlife, Western Australia).
Purpose
This dataset was requested by a data user and has been generated by TERN Eco-informatics for a global C4 grasses project undertaken by the US National Evolutionary Synthesis Centre. The title of the global project is "Toward A New Synthesis of the Evolutionary History & Ecology of C4 Grasses" (
http://www.nescent.org/science/awards_summary.php?id=152).