Fogs, chills and a bit of dirt

Remote, dusty, warm and - unusually - foggy and cold. A 9,600km field trip to measure changes to vegetation across the Cape was beautiful, challenging and a necessary undertaking on behalf of the Queensland Government and landholders to assess the health of the region.

The Cape York Land Condition Monitoring project carried out by Cape York NRM’s Geographical Information Systems specialist Lars Kazmeier and botanist Dr James Hill, required driving to 132 sites across the Cape recording pasture condition and woody thickening (density increase of wood plants).

The work took 27 days broken into four trips along main and secondary roads, with stops every 20km to assess the established monitoring sites.

“All NRMs have a core obligation to monitor the state of the country, looking at woody thickening and pastures and recording those changes. The monitoring is carried out every few years, the last was in 2019,” Lars said.

This year’s trips featured some tough conditions and constraints such as very rough dirt roads, which sometimes slowed driving to 40kms, and unusually warm temperatures.

“We travelled on about 80 per cent of dirt road to access sites, and the temperature was unusually warm, but bearable. Majority of days were around 30 degrees, which is not normally that high during winter in the southern areas of the Cape.”

Another challenge to the trip was the pressure of getting to sites before controlled burning started. With a later-than-normal wet season, fires were starting later, but still had to be completed by the end of July for most land managers to meet their carbon credit requirements.

“That was why the field work was so condensed. We had to really push to get as many sites surveyed before they got burned.”

But the biggest surprise was the cold. One night - and the only night they camped outdoors - the chill set in. They had enjoyed a meal with the station owners, and had set up camp nearby when it hit 6 degrees.

“I had a high-quality swag which was my saving grace. James had a tent. It was the coldest night,” Lars recalled with a smile.

And then there was the “intense fog”.

“We had to get off the road for an hour twice as visibility compromised safety. Quite untypical for the Cape.”

But for nine hours on average each day they visited site after site, assessing parameters and entering the data into to the Qld Government LCAT app.

“We don’t actually make the decision - what condition score the site gets. After all the parameters are entered, the app calculates the score. It’s important to avoid observer bias, and have a fully standardised assessment.”

To find the established sites, a GPS is used to find the start of 100m transects. The two men would walk out the site with a tape measure and take readings and photographs at specific intervals, which are entered into the app.

“We got assessments down to under half an hour at each site on average,” Lars said.

While the trip “wasn’t a holiday” there were many highlights. One was experiencing the good will of station owners and land managers for access to sites, and, when there were no commercial places to stay, their hospitality, which included rooms, cooked meals, and the offer of fuel, if needed.

Environmentally, the trip opened up new experiences.

“At Iron Range national park there was an incredibly high density of ant plants and we saw a pitcher plant which was quite special,” Lars said. “And for me, because I hadn’t seen it before, the rainforest right on the tip is quite different to the Wet Tropics rainforest, the structure, like the trees are much taller, therefore the understory is less dense… so the whole appearance is like a cathedral.”

Another highlight was being able to experience see such a large area in a short time. In particular, the flowering cycles of plants which can vary by up to two months in different areas. 

“For environmental scientists to actually have that snapshot of the whole of the Cape, in terms of the vegetation cover and what it does was fantastic.”

The data gathered is also a useful snapshot of land condition, Lars said. It provides information to land managers, for example, about the proportion and health of annual and perennial grasses, and what action could be implemented to improve pastures. It could also be used as a guidance tool for NRM project development.

This project is supported by Cape York NRM through funding from the Australian Government’s National Landcare Program.