page_title: Ecology of Tasmania
section_title: Flora
hierarchical_section_title: Ecology of Tasmania / Flora
caption_attribution_description: English: Mt Anne (capped in cloud) from High Shelf Camp, Southwest National Park, Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area, Tasmania, Australia. Français&#160;: Le Mont Anne drapé de nuages, vu du campement de High Shelf. Photo prise dans le Parc national Southwest, en Tasmanie (Australie). Le Parc national Southwest fait partie de la Zone de nature sauvage de Tasmanie (Tasmanian Wilderness), classée au patrimoine mondial.
context_page_description: The biodiversity of Tasmania is of exceptional biological and paleoecological interest. A state of Australia, it is a large South Pacific archipelago of one large main island and a range of smaller islands. The terrain includes a variety of reefs, atolls, many small islands, and a variety of topographical and edaphic regions on the largest island, all of which promote the development of unusually concentrated biodiversity. During long periods geographically and genetically isolated, it is known for its unique flora and fauna. The region's climate is oceanic.
context_section_description: The most ancient communities in Tasmania have an ancestry that extend back to a time when the Earth's continents were all joined as single landmass known as Pangea which existed beyond 200 million years ago. Pangea split from east to west into Laurasia, comprising North America and Eurasia, and Gondwana, the two remaining connected at Gibraltar with the Tethys Sea separating them. The presence of closely related organisms in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres cannot be accounted for by migration.
  The Antarctic flora is a distinct community of vascular plants which evolved millions of years ago on the supercontinent of Gondwana, and is now found on several separate areas of the Southern Hemisphere, including southern South America, southernmost Africa, New Zealand, Australia and New Caledonia. Based on the similarities in their flora, botanist Ronald Good identified a separate Antarctic Floristic Kingdom that included southern South America, New Zealand, and some southern island groups. Good identified Australia as its own floristic kingdom, and included New Guinea and New Caledonia in the Paleotropical floristic kingdom, because of the influx of tropical Eurasian flora that had mostly supplanted the Antarctic flora.
  Millions of years ago, Antarctica was warmer and much wetter, and supported the Antarctic flora, including forests of podocarps and southern beech. Antarctica was also part of the ancient supercontinent of Gondwanaland, which gradually broke up by continental drift starting 110 million years ago. The separation of South America from Antarctica 30-35 million years ago allowed the Antarctic Circumpolar Current to form, which isolated Antarctica climatically and caused it to become much colder. The Antarctic flora subsequently died out in Antarctica, but is still an important component of the flora of southern Neotropic (South America) and Australasia, which were also former parts of Gondwana.
  Some genera that originated in Antarctic Flora are still a recognised major component of New Caledonia, Tasmania, mainland Australia, Madagascar, India, New Zealand, and southern South America.
  There are three species of Nothofagus in Australia. Stands of myrtle beech (Nothofagus cunninghamii) exist in the Tarkine Forest. There are also stands of this species in the Great Otway National Park, the Central Highlands, the Strzelecki Ranges and Wilsons Promontory National Park, of Victoria.
  Deciduous beech (Nothofagus gunnii) occurs in mountainous parts of Tasmania. Antarctic beech (Nothofagus moorei) is found in eastern NSW cool temperate rainforests and cloud forests, but does not occur in Victoria or Tasmania.
  Australia rafted north and became drier; the humid Antarctic flora retreated to the mainland east coast and Tasmania, while much of the rest of Australian vegetation became dominated by Acacia, Eucalyptus, Casuarina and xeric shrubs and grasses. Humans arrived in Australia 50-60,000 years ago, and used fire to reshape the vegetation of the continent.
  The woody plants of the Antarctic Floristic Kingdom include conifers in the families Podocarpaceae, Araucariaceae and the subfamily Callitroideae of Cupressaceae, and angiosperms such as the families Proteaceae, Griseliniaceae, Cunoniaceae, Atherospermataceae, and Winteraceae, and genera like southern beech (Nothofagus) and fuchsia (Fuchsia). Many other families of flowering plants and ferns, including the tree fern Dicksonia, are characteristic of the Antarctic flora. In the past Tasmania was omitted since its plant species are more closely related to those found in the Australian Floristic Kingdom. Good noted, as had Joseph Dalton Hooker much earlier, that many plant species of Antarctica, temperate South America and New Zealand were very closely related, despite their disjunction by the vast Southern Ocean. Tasmania and New Caledonia share related species extinct in Australia mainland.
  Investigations of Upper Cretaceous and Early Tertiary sediments of Antarctica yield a rich assemblage of well-preserved fossil dicotyledonous angiosperm wood which provides evide
caption: Alpine heathland at High Shelf Camp near Mount Anne, in Southwest National Park. 60% of Tasmanian alpine flora is endemic to the state.[1]
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