Seed Knowledge > Species Navigator

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'How to' guides to help you get the most out of Species Navigator

Guide to using the Species Navigator
Download the guide here

Species Navigator Offline Scoring Sheet
This tool works with the Site Descriptor tool to help you to gather all the information needed about your site and your planning requirements so that you can get the most out of Species Navigator. Download the offline scoring sheet

Site Descriptor Tool
The Site Description Tool is designed to be used with the Species Navigator and Offline Scoring Sheet. It can also be used to describe the environment at your site and give you valuable information for property planning and choosing revegetation species suitable to your site.

Seed Collection Advisor
The Seed Collection Advisor is designed to help you maximise the genetic quality of collected seed.
Download the Seed Collection Advisor user guide

Species Navigator

You can use the Species navigator as an interactive tool by responding to the choices in the top left hand box below. This will give you a short-list of suitable species in the top right hand box. Each species has a fact sheet which you can access by clicking on the page icon to the left of the species name.

List of Fact Sheets
You can access the list of Fact Sheets here

Species Navigator provides decision support for growing native plants based on their ecology, uses or biology. It aims to assist revegetation practitioners and plant growers to navigate their way through the plethora of information available on native plants.

Species Navigator was developed by Maurice McDonald (formerly CSIRO Forest Biosciences now CSIRO Plant Industry) for Greening Australia using LUCID 3 software (see References below). This software is normally used to produce electronic interactive identification keys that focus on morphological differences among biological organisms. To our knowledge, Species Navigator is the first LUCID-type key to provide decision support for growing native plants based on their ecology, uses or biology.

In Species Navigator users can select species for revegetation based on environmental factors of the site being targeted for revegetation (e.g., climate parameters, soil factors, etc) or on other options such as desired growth traits and potential uses. Taxa that match the selections inputted are listed and a detailed profile of the entities selected can be viewed in an accompanying Fact Sheet.

The 300 or so taxa presented in this version of Species Navigator represent some of the most commonly used species in current revegetation activities in Australia, excluding the tropics. The species represented resulted from consultations with practitioners in south east Queensland, Victoria (mainly the Corangamite and North Central Natural Resource Management regions), ACT and NSW (ACT and Murrumbidgee Catchments Management Authorities), South Australia (Northern & Yorke Natural Resource Management Board) and south west Western Australia (Avon and South Coast Natural Resource Management regions). For most regions there are at least 20 common species represented, while for some regions up to 100 taxa are represented and many of them occur widely across other regions of Australia.

Species Navigator also incorporates a Navigate Seed Collection Advice component. This provides decision support on how to potentially optimise the genetic quality of seed when conducting seed collections of native plants from natural populations. This component evolved when a prototype of Species Navigator was presented to a panel of experts at a workshop on provenance issues in seed collections in 2004 as part of the ACMER Fifth Seed Biology Workshop (Carr, 2005). David Carr (Greening Australia) saw the potential to incorporate into Species Navigator some 'best practice' seed collection advice for revegetation practitioners. Many of the seed collection principles discussed by participants during the ACMER Workshop were used as a basis for this component of Species Navigator. The Navigate Seed Collection Advice component will also be presented as a separate 'stand alone' version on the Florabank Species Navigator. Funding support for this component may see a greatly expanded version in the future.

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Download A Guide to using Species Navigator
References, Acknowledgements and Disclaimer
Sources of Information

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Copyright in the Product is and remains the property of Greening Australia and the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation through its Australian Tree Seed Centre. Copyright in the Software is and remains the property of the University of Queensland.