The pre-colonial distribution of grasslands, woodlands and forests on the Werribee plains, Victoria.

Sinclair, Steve; Atchison, Keshia

doi:10.7751/cunninghamia.2012.12.017

Cited by 23 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…Tree densities vary. Under pre‐agricultural qualities, tree growth is thought to have been limited by the physiological difficulty of drawing water from clay soils, by regular burning by aboriginal managers, by browsing, and by competition with herbaceous species (Sinclair & Atchison ). There is a large literature that testifies to the importance of these factors in savannahs globally (Skarpe ; Sankaran et al.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A condition metric for Eucalyptus woodland derived from expert evaluations

Sinclair

Bruce

Griffioen³

et al. 2017

Conservation Biology

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The evaluation of ecosystem quality is important for land-management and land-use planning.Evaluation is unavoidably subjective, and robust metrics must be based on consensus and the structured use of observations. We devised a transparent and repeatable process for building and testing ecosystem metrics based on expert data. We gathered quantitative evaluation data on the quality of hypothetical grassy woodland sites from experts. We used these data to train a model (

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A condition metric for Eucalyptus woodland derived from expert evaluations

Sinclair

Bruce

Griffioen³

et al. 2017

Conservation Biology

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“…Sites consist of private land managed for grain production, which formerly supported the grassland ecosystem (Sinclair and Atchison 2012). We sampled three sites on a single large farm that had been cropped within the year preceding the study ( We used a point-intercept method for quantifying vegetation cover, with 500 points on five transects (100 points per line, 20 cm apart) within a 20 3 20 m square plot.…”

Section: Testing the Model With Field Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantifying ecosystem quality by modeling multi‐attribute expert opinion

Sinclair

Griffioen

Duncan

et al. 2015

Ecological Applications

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The evaluation of ecosystem quality is inherently subjective, requiring decisions about which variables to notice or measure, and how these variables are integrated into a coherent evaluation. Despite the central role of human judgment, few evaluation methods address the subjectivity that is inherent in their design. There are, however, advantages to directly using opinion to create an expert system where the metric is constructed around opinion data. These advantages include stakeholder inclusion and the encouragement of a dialogue of data-driven criticism rather than subjective counter-opinion. We create an expert system to express the quality of a grassland ecosystem in Australia. We use an ensemble of bagged regression trees trained on calibrated expert preference data, to model the perceived quality of this grassland using a set of eight site variables as inputs. The model provides useful predictions of grassland quality, producing predictions similar to real expert evaluations of independent synthetic test sites not used to train the model. We apply the model to real grassland sites ranging from pristine to highly degraded, and confirm that our model orders the sites according to their degree of modification. We demonstrate that the use of too few experts produces relatively poor results, and show that for our problem the use of data from over twenty experts is appropriate. The scaling approach we used to calibrate between-expert data is shown to be an appropriate mechanism for aggregating the opinions of multiple experts. The resultant model will be useful in many contexts, and can be used by managers as a tool to evaluate real sites. It can also be integrated into ecological models of change as a means of evaluating predicted changes, for example, as a measure of utility when combined with cost estimates. The basic approach demonstrated here is applicable to any ecosystem, and we discuss the opportunities and limitations of its wider use.

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“…A reconstruction of pre-colonial vegetation patterns on the Werribee Plains shows a fragmented mix of wooded vegetation types in a matrix of treeless grassland, where the absence of trees is attributed to a mix of explanations including Aboriginal burning (Sinclair and Atchison 2012). There is also evidence from century-scale change studies in related systems nearby, that the absence of disturbance, especially the cessation of Aboriginal burning, can trigger a rapid shift from open grassy woodland dominated by drooping she-oak, eucalypts and honeysuckle (with very few shrubs), to closed scrub dominated by wattles (Lunt 1998).…”

Section: Victoria's Western Plains (Volcanic Plains)mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Sinclair and Atchison 2012). Annotations from historic plans abound with references to trees and wooded vegetation; phrases such as 'lightly wooded', 'thinly timbered' and 'scattered sheoak' are particularly common.…”

Section: Victoria's Western Plains (Volcanic Plains)mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Putative explanations of treelessness in temperate grasslands comprise a diverse mix of both (1) 'bottom-up' processes (seasonal droughting, severe drought, difficulties in seedling establishment in heavy soils, waterlogging) and (2) 'top-down' processes (frost and snow damage and low temperature, grazing, dense grass sward competition, frequent fire) operating at various spatio-temporal scales (Fensham 1989;Fensham and Kirkpatrick 1992;Lunt 1997;Fensham and Fairfax 2007;Sinclair and Atchison 2012). A nested, two-scale treelessness model is proposed on the basis of the Pleistocene or Holocene relict hypotheses developed for montane grasslands in southeastern Queensland and Tasmania (Ellis 1985;Fairfax 1996, 2006;Bowman et al 2013).…”

Section: Rationale For Hypothesesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A framework for testing the influence of Aboriginal burning on grassy ecosystems in lowland, mesic south–eastern Australia

Foreman¹

2016

Aust. J. Bot.

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Abstract. The complex interactions among climate, soils, fire and humans in the biogeography of natural grasslands has long been debated in Australia. On the one hand, ecological models assume the primacy of climate and soils. On the other, Aboriginal burning is hypothesised to have altered the entire continent since before the last glacial maximum. The present paper develops a framework to test for the 'fingerprint' of Aboriginal burning in lowland, mesic grassy ecosystems of south-eastern Australia, using ecological theory, and the ethno-historical record. It is clear that fire-stick farming was used to promote staple roots in south-eastern Australia and, in some instances, it has been shown to influence grassland-woodland boundaries. The framework comprises the following three evidence lines: (1) archival benchmarking and palaeoecology; (2) phytoecology; and (3) ethnology and archaeology. That fire-stick farming was likely instrumental in grassland formation and maintenance must be supported by evidence that shows that 'natural' grasslands exist in climatically-edaphically unexpected places, that fine-scale patterns and dynamics are at least partly due to fire and that the fire regime has been influenced by Aboriginal burning. Application of the framework indicated that widespread Aboriginal burning for staple foods likely extended the area of temperate grasslands and influenced their structure and function.

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The pre-colonial distribution of grasslands, woodlands and forests on the Werribee plains, Victoria.

Cited by 23 publications

References 5 publications

A condition metric for Eucalyptus woodland derived from expert evaluations

A condition metric for Eucalyptus woodland derived from expert evaluations

Quantifying ecosystem quality by modeling multi‐attribute expert opinion

A framework for testing the influence of Aboriginal burning on grassy ecosystems in lowland, mesic south–eastern Australia

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