Cultivation of novel Sub-Antarctic Plants

Metadata record for data expected ASAC Project 1264 See thelink below for public details on this project.---- Public Summary from Project---- Australia's subantarctic islands are both precious wilderness areas and a biological resource. This project is establishing a world class Subantarctic House at the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens in Hobart. This centre will be a major tourist and educational attraction informing the community about these rare island ecosystems, and a valuable research facility. This project also aims to develop to the commercial stage, new horticultural and food crops from material collected from the islands. Without damage to our subantarctic island environments and hence maintaining their conservation value, we will develop new industries with these novel plants.Plants were collected by Dana Bergstrom, Kate Kiefer, Craig Tweedie, Justine Shaw, Tore Pedersen, Tony Orchard and Jim Cane. The plants were mainly collected from Macquarie Island, but some were collected from Heard Island. On Macquarie Island, many plants were collected within the vicinity of the station at the Isthmus - in an arc between Handspike Pt (for Poa littorosa and Carex trifida), up Gadget Gully, across to North Mountain, down Mt Elder and back along the coast. As the plants were only being collected for cultivation back in Tasmania, and for storage in the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens Herbarium, little information about each plant was recorded at the time of collection. Plants were generally collected in a non-scientific manner and often the day before the ship was due to leave.An excel spreadsheet detailing which species were collected, an approximate location, the collectors name, whether the plant is still alive in the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens, and their accession numbers at the RTBG is available for download at the URL given below. A word document with some propagation information is also available for download at the same URL.