Monitoring Threatened Species and Ecological Communities

26 – Involving volunteers in threatened plant monitoring in South Australia^335

recovery team be established to guide the plan’s implementation plan, although in
practice there is no obligation to do so. As a result only 43 (35%) of SA’s EPBC-
listed f lora are managed by a recovery team (Table 26.2).
Many of the recovery plans and recovery teams for South Australian
threatened f lora cover multiple species (hence the smaller number of plans than
taxa with plans in Table 26.2). There is no doubt that the drafting and
implementation of multi–species recovery plans allows for more efficient use of
resources, but in reality it often means that the on-ground recovery of several
species is left to a much smaller group of people (i.e. the members of one multi-
species recovery team). However, this is not to say that a single species team model
is better, because in any one region the same people are likely to be participating,
whether in one team or numerous.
With so many species at risk in South Australia, it is important not only to
prioritise the species to receive attention, but also to determine which populations
and sites should be targeted. As Table 26.3 indicates, even a species with a relatively
small population in total can be distributed over numerous sites or sub-populations.

Table 26.2. The number of recovery plans and recovery teams for EPBC-listed flora in South Australia.

Note that some recovery plans cover multiple taxa.

EPBC-listed

flora in SA

Taxa with

recovery plans

Number of

recovery plans

Taxa with

recovery teams

Active recovery

teams

NRM regions in

SA with active

recovery teams

124 106 35

(6 multi–taxa)

43 6

(4 multi–taxa)

4

(n = 8)

Table 26.3. Examples of some South Australian nationally threatened plant species with small population
sizes but distributed over a large number of sites.

Ta xon Population size Number of sites

Spiny daisy

Acanthocladium dockeri

~500^1 6 remnant, 18 planted

Spalding blown-grass

Lachnagrostis limitanea

4200 4 remnant, 3 planted

Monarto mintbush

Prostanthera eurybioides

2330 9 remnant, 6 planted

Mt Compass swamp-oak

Allocasuarina robusta

1200 31

Mt Compass marsh gum

Eucalyptus paludicola

590 25

Pink-lipped spider-orchid

Caladenia behrii

5700 ~50

(^1) Note that the recovery plan for spiny daisy (Clarke et al. 2013) states that in 2007, 5422 ‘plants’ were recorded at the six remnant (natural) sites; however, the
species is clonal and spreads from suckers, so the 5422 ‘plants’ are actually clonal ramets. In effect, the six remnant populations are comprised of less than 20
individual plants, and the majority of individual plants in existence are now located at translocation sites.