Vegetation history at Lake Curlip in lowland eastern Victoria, from 5200 B.P. to present

Abstract

The Lake Curlip swamp is part of the Snowy River flats and is covered mainly by Phragmites grassland and Melaleuca thickets. The land bordering the flats is generally cleared, but there are some open-forests dominated by eucalypts, and small patches of Acmena closed-forest occur in sheltered sites on the flats or in gullies. Sediments from a core taken from the swamp cover the period 5200 B.P. to present. From 5200 B.P. to about 1500 B.P., the pollen record shows very little change, but from 1500B.P. to the present, swamp plant pollen proportions undergo marked fluctuations. Most of the sediments under the Lake Curlip swamp were deposited under saline water; pollen and spores in the sediments were derived mainly from the Snowy and Brodribb Rivers, which flowed into a large common estuary. After 1700 B.P., the water over the core site became fresher, hydrosere succession followed, culminating in the growth of a Melaleuca ericifolia closed-scrub. Water-borne pollen and spores were eliminated from the site, but have recently been reintroduced with flood waters from the Brodribb Channel. The pollen record from Lake Curlip swamp suggests that there has been little change in the distribution of dry-land vegetation in this area. From this it must be concluded that the climate in the past 5200 years has been quite similar to that of the present.