The Site That Looked Fine on Aerial Imagery and Wasn't
Remote sensing catches broad vegetation types at the polygon level. It doesn't catch the grazed understorey beneath an apparently intact tree canopy, the cryptogam crust that's been disturbed by vehicle access, or the scattered fallen timber that indicates prior logging activity affecting current structural complexity. The difference between a habitat that supports the focal species and one that doesn't often lives in the detail that only an on-ground assessment captures.
This template is that assessment, structured for repeatability and comparability across sites and assessors.
Vegetation Stratification: Three Layers That Define Structural Complexity
Dominant Upperstory, Dominant Midstory, Dominant Lowerstory. Three text fields for species composition by canopy stratum. The Vegetation Association multichoice anchors the site to the recognised plant community type — the classification that determines which threatened species are predicted to use the site and which disturbance regimes are appropriate for management.
Tree Canopy Cover and Tree Health both use multichoice percentage and condition classes. An intact canopy over a degraded understorey is a structurally compromised habitat — the cover metric looks adequate but the below-canopy foraging and nesting resources are absent. Tree Health captures senescence, die-back, and disease that canopy cover alone misses. Old-growth hollow-bearing trees can appear structurally marginal in a cover assessment but ecologically critical in a hollow availability survey.
Shrub Cover and Shrub Height Range (in metres) together describe the mid-level structural complexity. Perennial Grass/Sedge/Herb Cover and Cryptogams complete the lowerstory picture. A site with 80% shrub cover but zero cryptogam crust and no perennial grass has been structurally compromised at the ground layer — often by sustained grazing pressure that the shrub layer has escaped.
Disturbance Indicators: The Four Fields That Flag Condition
Grazed, Logged, Fallen Timber, Litter Cover — four fields that together build the disturbance history of the site. A site that is grazed but has abundant fallen timber, intact litter, and cryptogam presence is being grazed at a level that hasn't compromised ecological function. A site that is grazed with no fallen timber, no litter, and no cryptogam crust has been severely impacted.
Logged records current or historical logging evidence. Combined with Fallen Timber — which distinguishes naturally recruited coarse woody debris from logging slash — the two fields together characterise the structural legacy of past land use. Old-growth attributes like large diameter fallen timber recruit over decades; a site logged thirty years ago may still have negligible coarse woody debris of the dimensions that support hollow-dependent species.
Soil Description and Soil Disturbance close the assessment. Granite Present is the lithology flag that drives species predictions in granite-associated communities. Coordinates and two site photos are the spatial record that allows the assessment to be revisited, compared, and reported without ambiguity about which patch of ground was actually assessed.