Gymnosperms of Australia

At the continental scale, endemism in gymnosperms is the rule rather than the exception. This concept applies especially to the island continent of Australia. The only species on this list that are not endemic to Australia are Araucaria cunninghamii, with var. papuana native to New Guinea; and Sundacarpus amara, found in Australia, India, Malaysia, New Britain, and the Philippines.

Herbarium data, including map generation, are now available for almost all Australian native plants at the Australia Virtual Herbarium.

Australian conifer diversity is basically arrayed upon a mountainous stage that reaches from the Antarctic shoreline of Tasmania, northward along the Great Dividing Range to the utter tip of Cape York, a span of 33 degrees of latitude, from cool temperate into hot tropical. The moisture regime is hugely variable, ranging from semiarid regions occupied by drought-tolerant species of Callitris and Macrozamia to soggy mountaintops, receiving as much as 9 meters of rain per year, and home to species such as Agathis atropurpurea (in the north) or Lagarostrobos franklinii (in the south). Besides the grand ecological transect of the Great Dividing Range, Australia's conifers mainly fall into two groups, the drought-resistant Callitris (found in every state), and the rainforest Agathis species that reach out onto flat coastal Queensland. Tasmania, however, is the summit of Australian conifer diversity:

"Long as the Island of Tasmania has been colonized by Europeans, its noblest trees, and those too belonging to that most readily recognized and important Natural Order (the 'Pines'), have, until quite lately, been little understood by Botanists. Whilst the continent of Australia was known to possess numerous species of Callitris and Podocarpus, and New Zealand has been celebrated as yielding a remarkable proportion of Coniferae, Tasmania was generally supposed to produce much fewer of these most useful trees. Such, however, is not in reality the case; for the island in question is now proved to contain a greater number of species in proportion to its area, and these of more peculiar forms, than any other country" (Hooker 1845). Hooker, of course, was not aware of New Caledonia's conifer diversity, which was largely undescribed in 1845 (that little island has 17 times as many endemic conifer species per unit area, compared to Tasmania), but Tasmania remains one of the world's hotspots of conifer diversity and endemism.

It's worth noting that some of the most abundant conifers in Australia are non-native. Although Callitris spp. and Araucaria cunninghamii are both grown commercially for softwood production, the most common plantation softwood of all (yielding 75% of Australia's softwood production) is Pinus radiata. Originally from California, the Australian trees have been subjected to extensive selective breeding and are planted out as rooted cuttings from clonal plants. This is as close as any conifer in the world comes to being an artificial species.

Species List

Citations

Hooker, Joseph D. 1845. On the Huon Pine, and on Microcachrys, a New Genus of Conifers from Tasmania; together with Remarks upon the Geographical Distribution of that Order in the Southern Hemisphere. London Journal of Botany 4:137-157. Available at the Biodiversity Heritage Library (accessed 2015.02.04).