Revision of PATN analysis of grassland associations

Introduction
Natural Temperate Grassland (NTG) is a Commonwealth listed endangered ecological community. NTG is found within the Southern Tablelands region of NSW and ACT, in south-eastern Australia (Environment ACT, 2005). This community is characterised by a dominance of a suite of grasses and a diversity of forbs. Previous analyses have identified a number of distinct associations (Benson, 1994; Sharp, 1997), though these analyses were incomplete. Benson only analysed data from the Monaro and ACT, while Sharp’s analysis was only of ACT site data.

The National Recovery Plan for Natural Temperate Grassland of the Southern Tablelands (NSW & ACT) (Environment ACT, 2005) has as an action the requirement for analysis of data to identify floristic associations, to ensure regional and subregional identification of all structural and compositional variation within the
endangered ecological community (section 5 Previous and Future Recovery Actions, subsection 5.1 Information base). Funds were made available from Natural Temperate Grassland Recovery Team in 2006 to undertake a PATN analysis of available grassland data to derive a classification of the compositional variation with grasslands of the Southern Tablelands. This report is a revision of an earlier analysis and uses only data from the areas below 1200 m. It gives the results of the reanalysis of the data and including the dendrogram output of the PATN analysis.