Cunninghamia 8(3): 2004 Heyligers & Adams, Flora and vegetation of Montagu Island 285 Flora and vegetation of Montagu Island – past and present Petrus C. Heyligers1 and Laurie G. Adams2 1 (CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems, Queensland Biosciences Precinct, 306 Carmody Road, St. Lucia, Q 4067; 2Australian National Herbarium, CSIRO Plant Industry, GPO Box 1600, Canberra, ACT 2601, AUSTRALIA. Corresponding author, email:
[email protected] Abstract: Montagu Island (36°15’S; 150°14’E) is situated about 10 km east of Narooma on the New South Wales South Coast. The paper presents evidence about the changes in the terrestrial vegetation of the island since it was first seen by Europeans, provides a floristic inventory and gives a perspective on the effects of introduced species. Flinders (1814) mentions that the island ‘produced small trees.’ This is the only record of what grew on the island until in 1880 annotations on a map, made at the time of the construction of the lighthouse, mentioned the presence of scrub, trees and rank grass. This is confirmed by photographic evidence, but by 1932, when the botanist F. A. Rodway visited the island, the trees had disappeared. In 1973, during a land use survey of the South Coast, a team of CSIRO described the vegetation as a distinct series of dune communities belonging to the Lomandra longifolia – Pteridium esculentum – Phragmites australis complex. Vegetation mapping in the late 1980s confirmed the prevalence of these species, except that Pennisetum clandestinum then covered a large area along the west side of the island. Excluding taxa used for ornamental or culinary purposes, nearly 200 species of vascular plants have been recorded since 1932 of which about 140 were still present in the late 1990s.