The coastal habitats and Vegetation of the Kimberley region

Incorporating the areas of the rocky Kimberley Coast, flanked by the deltaic gulfs of Cambridge Gulf and King Sound, as well as the Dampier Peninsula, the Kimberley region host a complicated coastal zone with a plethora of coastal habitats. The smallest scale of habitat includes rocky cliff, scree slopes, gravelly/bouldery shore, sandy beaches, spits, dunes, tidal mud flats, alluvial fans, and the contact between some of these habitats and freshwater. The main vegetation units include mangroves, shrubby chenopods (which include succulent halophytic shrubs), saline marsh, sedgelands, rushlands, dune scrub, dune grasslands, and teatree thickets. The spatially and temporally variable landscape, sediments/soils, and hydrochemistry expressed at the coast mean that the coastal vegetation habitats are the most complex habitats in the Kimberley region. This review found that to date these have not been fully explored or described botanically.