Recovery of alpine vegetation on the Eastern Central Plateau, Tasmania: results from 20 years of monitoring and future potential under climate change

Recovery of alpine vegetation on the Eastern Central Plateau, Tasmania: results from 20 years of monitoring and future potential under climate change. The Eastern Central Plateau, Tasmania has been severely impacted in the past by stock grazing and landscape scale fires. While the Central Plateau is the largest extent of alpine vegetation in Australia, it also is known for having the largest areas of sheet erosion due to fire (wild and anthropogenic) and grazing from livestock and wild herbivores (including rabbits). Livestock have been excluded from public land on the Central Plateau since 1989. Rabbits and native herbivores, namely wallabies and wombats, provide much of the grazing pressure. A series of grazing exclosures were erected at four degraded sites in 1991. Two exclosures at each site excluded all vertebrate herbivores and two excluded wallabies but allowed access to rabbits. Two controls allowing access to all herbivores were also surveyed. These exclosures have been monitored every five years since 1991. Scientists from the Climate Futures for Tasmania project have provided downscaled projected climate data for 10 x 10 km grid cells. The Eastern Central Plateau is projected to be the most severely impacted region in the, experiencing greater increases in temperature and greater decreases in rainfall with higher temperatures and lower rainfall under climate change projections. This presentation will discuss the natural recovery of vegetation in the exclosures with reference to past events and forward climate projections.