Ground cover
Ground cover is provided by living or dead plants and any of their parts that fall to the surface of the ground. Cover may also be provided by pebbles and rocks or a crust of cryptogamic materials (plant life without ‘true’ flowers and seeds, such as mosses, lichens and fungi). Groundcover may be considered as being anything below your eye level that intercepts a vertically falling raindrop.
Ground cover has a number of important functions relating to productivity and environmental health including:
- preventing water erosion by absorbing the impact of falling raindrops that may otherwise cause the soil surface to seal and contribute to excessive runoff
- reducing the velocity of runoff and encourage it to spread out rather than to concentrate and develop into an erosive force
- preventing wind erosion by reducing the wind velocity adjacent to the soil surface
- moderating soil surface temperature which helps to reduce evaporation rates from the soil surface
- being a natural habitat and food source for a wide variety of living organisms
- being used to assess and monitor the health of native vegetation
- recycling of nutrients as plant products are allowed to decompose and nutrients are returned to the soil.
Ground cover measurement is an important component of assessing the health of a landscape from a biodiversity viewpoint. When making observations for biodiversity purposes, we are interested in the different components that make up ground cover, rather than the total amount of cover. Monitoring ground cover can:
- help you assess the degree of risk of land degradation occurring
- determine landscapes that are already in a degraded condition.
At the catchment scale, an overall indication of ground cover can be used as an assessment of catchment health and the vulnerability of the land to soil erosion and its associated impact on water quality.
Download the following files for more information:
- Land Manager’s Monitoring Guide—Ground cover indicator (PDF, 607K)*
- Datasheet templates for level 1 monitoring (PDF, 44K)*
- Datasheet templates for level 1 monitoring (Excel, 41K)‡
- Datasheet templates for level 2a monitoring (PDF, 39K)*
- Datasheet templates for level 2a monitoring (Excel, 48K)‡
- Datasheets templates for level 2b monitoring (PDF, 72K)*
- Datasheets templates for level 2b monitoring (Excel, 25K)‡
* Requires Adobe Reader
‡ Requires Microsoft Office files viewer
Last updated 6 September 2010