South West Australian Transitional Transect (SWATT)

The SWATT is an initiative developed collaboratively by TERN's Australian Transect Network and the Department of Parks and Wildlife, Western Australia (DPaW). The SWATT is one of four national ecological transects or plot networks that traverse key Australian terrestrial ecosystems. The principal purpose of the transects is to measure selected biodiversity attributes along with biophysical processes, that will inform key ecosystem science questions and assist with the development and validation of ecosystem models. Transects will enable benchmarking and subsequent monitoring of trends in ecological condition in response to continental scale biophysical processes such as climate change. The SWATT is located in the south west of Western Australian extending for over 1,200km from Walpole on the south coast to just beyond the former pastoral lease of Lorna Glen and into the Little Sandy Desert. The SWATT incorporates the internationally recognised biodiversity hotspot that is the Southwest Botanical Province (Myers et al. 2000, Hopper P & Gioia 2004), a national biodiversity hotspot (Central and Eastern Avon Wheatbelt) and the evolutionary significant species rich Southwest Interzone (Hopper 1979, Gibson et al. 2010) which includes the globally significant Great Western Woodlands (GWW) (Watson et al. 2009). The SWATT also intercepts another two national significant phytogeographic transitional zone, the Triodia-Acacia line (Beard 1975) and the Menzies line (Butt et al. 1977). Please use the following URL to access the dataset: http://aekos.org.au/collection/wa.gov.au/swatt