Where are we going?

A little geography primer, some specifics about the area we will work, and a few maps to set the stage for our travels.

Australia is, more or less, a vast desert. There are a number of coastal regions that are not as dry and this is where most Australians live. All of the larger cities and heavily populated areas, with the exception of the city of Perth, are in the eastern half of the continent.

The western third of the continent is a single state that is simply named "Western Australia." It encompasses over 1 million square miles. How big is that? More than 3 times the size of Texas. To gain some perspective on the the extent of the desert regions there - the combined area of the three major deserts in Western Australia are twice as large as California. The Perth metropolitan region is home to ~1.5 million people, which represents 3/4 of Western Australia's total population. This means there are a lot more large kangaroos in Western Australia than people.

We will fly into Perth and then drive roughly 200 miles north to an area called Eneabba (see the green pushpin on the map to the right). A long stretch of the coastal region north of Perth has been dubbed the coral coast (the dark blue region on the map to the left) and it is renowned for its amazing diversity of flowering plants. This plant diversity is one of the reasons we are going to work there (a future posting will hopefully discuss this in more detail).


Despite the fact we will not be on the coast, our study area is a small part of an extensive sand-plain coastal region. The particular habitat type we will work in, the Kwongan Heathlands, used to cover a large proportion of the coastal sand plains. It has been greatly reduced in its extent, primarily through natural habitat being converted to farmland.