Vegetation plot surveys involve measuring out a small (usually square) area, then counting the different plant species within the plot. The plots can be permanently marked, so you can come back later and repeat the survey. This allows the data to be compared over time. Vegetation plot surveys are cheap to do as you just need simple tools like tape measures, pegs, and plant identification books. You might want to use this method to see if managing feral herbivores or weeds is working, or seeing how cultural burning affects plant communities.

Why are Vegetation Plot Surveys useful?

• Clear picture of habitat health: By measuring plant cover, height, and diversity, these surveys give a reliable snapshot of ecosystem condition and how it’s changing.
• Tracks long-term change: Because plots can be re-measured over years, they help identify trends like recovery after disturbance or the spread of invasive plants.
• Useful for management: The information gathered helps land managers decide where to prioritise weed control, fire management, or restoration work.
• Identify and monitor important plants: Show you where culturally significant and/or rare and threatened plants occur and enable you to track them over time.

What can Vegetation Plots monitor?

Vegetation Plots measure the number of different plants in an area. These may be plants you care about, such a bush tucker and threatened species, or plants you worry about, such as weeds.

What can you learn?

You can learn which plant species live on your Country and where they grow and how many there are (plant biodiversity).

By comparing the counts over time and between different plots you can get an understanding of how things are changing. For example, you may want to burn in one area and leave another similar area unburnt. By putting plots in both areas, and surveying before and after burning, you can see how the burning changes the types of plants and how they grow over time. You could also relate this to other monitoring methods to check if animals respond to the differences you see in plant communities.

What can’t you learn?

• Hidden plants: Vegetation plots can't always tell you about all plants on Country. Some plants can be hard to find or only grow or flower at certain times of year, so you might miss them during your collection work.
• Fast changes: Vegetation plots often miss short-term events (e.g., a brief weed flush after rain) because surveys are usually spaced months or years apart.
• Exact causes of change: They show that vegetation has changed, but not always why (e.g., grazing, disease, fire, or climate impacts).

Using Vegetation Plots the Right-way

REMEMBER! Any time you do work that might disturb or interfere with native animals and vegetation, particularly threatened species, you need to check with the state authorities to see if you need any approvals, such as scientific licences or animal ethics committee permits.

Plan which dates you will do the surveys.

• This may depend on when plants are in flower as many plants are hard to identify without flowers.
• If plants only flower after rain, you will need to decide how long after rains this happens. If it only rains in patchy areas on your country, you may need to do these different areas at different times.

Select your sites

• If you want to see if your management actions are helping, put some plots in the areas that the management is occurring and some in areas that are the same vegetation type but are not being managed. You can then compare the differences.
• If you are trying to learn what plants are on country, then you might want to place the plots in random areas and ensure you survey in different types of country, such as grasslands and woodlands.
• You may want to put plots in areas that in the past have had plants you are interested in, or where some event has happened, or is going to happen, such as a fire.

You can learn more about using the Vegetation Plots to monitor on the “Things We Care About” and “Thing We Worry About” pages and in the Environmental Monitoring Method Vegetation Plots Surveys SOP