Open Access

John S. Benson, C.B. Allen, C. Togher, J. Lemmon

• For the Western Plains of New South Wales, 213 plant communities are classified and described and their protected area and threat status assessed. The communities are listed on the NSW Vegetation Classification and Assessment database (NSWVCA). The full description of the communities is placed on an accompanying CD together with a read-only version of the NSWVCA database. The NSW Western Plains is 45.5 million hectares in size and covers 57% of NSW. The vegetation descriptions are based on over 250 published and unpublished vegetation surveys and maps produced over the last 50 years (listed in a bibliography), rapid field checks and the expert knowledge on the vegetation. The 213 communities occur over eight Australian bioregions and eight NSW Catchment Management Authority areas. As of December 2005, 3.7% of the Western Plains was protected in 83 protected areas comprising 62 public conservation reserves and 21 secure property agreements. Only one of the eight bioregions has greater than 10% of its area represented in protected areas. 31 or 15% of the communities are not recorded from protected areas. 136 or 64% have less than 5% of their pre-European extent in protected areas. Only 52 or 24% of the communities have greater than 10% of their original extent protected, thus meeting international guidelines for representation in protected areas. 71 or 33% of the plant communities are threatened, that is, judged as being ‘critically endangered’, ‘endangered’ or ‘vulnerable’. While 80 communities are recorded as being of ‘least concern’ most of these are degraded by lack of regeneration of key species due to grazing pressure and loss of top soil and some may be reassessed as being threatened in the future. Threatening processes include vegetation clearing on higher nutrient soils in wetter regions, altered hydrological regimes due to draw-off of water from river systems and aquifers, high continuous grazing pressure by domestic stock, feral goats and rabbits, and in some places native herbivores — preventing regeneration of key plant species, exotic weed invasion along rivers and in fragmented vegetation, increased salinity, and over the long term, climate change. To address these threats, more public reserves and secure property agreements are required, vegetation clearing should cease, re-vegetation is required to increase habitat corridors and improve the condition of native vegetation, environmental flows to regulated river systems are required to protect inland wetlands, over-grazing by domestic stock should be avoided and goat and rabbit numbers should be controlled and reduced. Conservation action should concentrate on protecting plant communities that are threatened or are poorly represented in protected areas.