Literature review: Impact of Chilean needle grass ... - Weeds Australia

Groves (1965) found that a very high proportion of the biomass (62-90% varying seasonally), in a T. triandra grassland at St
Albans consisted of the dominant grass. Usually the Themeda tussocks are mostly widely spaced (10 cm or more apart) and grass
cover may be only 30-50% (Lunt et al. 1998, Lunt and Morgan 2002), but they can be more closely spaced with a canopy of
loosely interlaced leaves (Carter et al. 2003). Such cover values of dominant grasses appear typical for mid-latitude grassland:
for example McArdle et al. (2004) found that the invasive grass Hyparrhenia hirta had an average cover of 65.5% in areas where
it dominated in open woodlands on the North West Slopes of New South Wales, and caespitose grasses and Cypreacace
accounted for >50% of cover in one southern Brazilian grassland (Overbeck and Pfadenhauer 2007). Projective foliar cover of
grasses in fire adapted grasslands is obviously highly dependent on the time since fire. One year after fire in T. trianda grassland
at Derrimut, bare ground was c. 40%; after 2 years this had reduced to c. 25%; and after 3 years had fallen to