Vegetation and Wildlife
The park is very flat with few elevated features. For the most part it is grassland, with trees only along the watercourses and around the normally dry lakes and depressions.The low woodland is dominated by black box (Eucalyptus largiflorens) and River Cooba (Acacia stenophylla). Before European settlement saltbush, cotton bush and native grasses are likely to have been the main plant cover on the plains. However, over 100 years of grazing and some pasture improvement have modified this and the plant and animal communities do not represent the environments that existed prior to European settlement. Despite this, Willandra is important habitat for many native species, including the emu, the threatened Plains-wanderer, red and grey kangaroos, echindas and a variety of reptiles, such as Gould's Sand Goanna and the Mulga Brown Snake.
Read more about this topic: Willandra National Park
Famous quotes containing the words vegetation and/or wildlife:
“We love to see any redness in the vegetation of the temperate zone. It is the color of colors. This plant speaks to our blood.... What a perfect maturity it arrives at! It is the emblem of a successful life concluded by a death not premature, which is an ornament to Nature. What if we were to mature as perfectly, root and branch, glowing in the midst of our decay, like the poke!”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Russian forests crash down under the axe, billions of trees are dying, the habitations of animals and birds are layed waste, rivers grow shallow and dry up, marvelous landscapes are disappearing forever.... Man is endowed with creativity in order to multiply that which has been given him; he has not created, but destroyed. There are fewer and fewer forests, rivers are drying up, wildlife has become extinct, the climate is ruined, and the earth is becoming ever poorer and uglier.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)