Having wrapped up Cert II in Conservation & Land Management, I've just signed on for Cert III which gets under way in another 3 weeks time. In the meantime however, the powers that be have allowed me to have a crack at the Cert IV level, Monitor Biodiversity, assignment. I've actually spent about a week or more in the planning and preparation stages for this one, but this morning headed out to Craigie Bush Reserve to get the survey and data sorted. I've titled my project - "An investigation into the endemic plant communities of the Quindalup Dunes region of Craigie Bush Reserve."
As can be seen in the photo above, I dragged fellow CLM student, Adam Ward, along to help out with this one (I'm the good looking one of the right, by the way). Er, anyway, after a morning spent setting up a 30M transect with mini quadrats and then a full size 10M X 10M quadrat, we set up another 10M x 10M quadrat in a Quondong thicket because I've been keen to calculate density figures within an area that visually had a high concentration of Santalum acuminatum (Quondong) trees. Over the next few weeks I'll be piecing all of the information together to investigate Genera and species diversity, density, foliage protective cover and adding in some Braun-Blanquet Cover Abundance Scale. There was another section of the Quindalup Dunes region that I was going to look at, but the Water Authority who supposedly own that piece of land won't reply to me in a positive manner. Maybe they think I'll find some rare species that'll stop them squirting water back into the aquifer ... :)
