Fieldwork starts with SEED

Most people look at bushland and see a wall of green. SEED helps you see past that.

For environmental scientist and UTS lecturer Dr Charlotte Simpson-Young, understanding a patch of bushland starts not on the ground, but on a map. When Charlotte began her PhD in plant ecology, she faced a practical challenge shared by ecologists, planners, and researchers across NSW: environmental data existed, but it wasn't easy to explore. Today, she uses SEED's spatial map to locate Sydney's native plant communities, and she's teaching the next generation of landscape architects to do the same.

Charlotte was studying the impact of urbanisation on Sydney Sandstone Dry Sclerophyll Forest and Woodlands – specifically, which plant species thrive under urban pressure, which struggle, and how well revegetation projects are working. To do that, she needed to locate patches of the right vegetation type, scattered over national parks and urban bushland reserves across Northern Sydney.

The data she needed existed in published scientific reports. But printed reports can't show you where to go. You can't zoom into a suburb, scan a reserve, or compare locations across a region. Without a way to visualise and explore that data spatially, scoping her research would have meant months of manual searching with no guarantee of finding the right sites.

"You can't just use a report to explore and figure out where you want to go…it doesn't work like that." 

Dr Charlotte Simpson-Young, Plant Ecologist and Lecturer, University of Technology Sydney (UTS)

Finding the forest before you visit it

Charlotte turned to SEED's spatial map, specifically, the Vegetation Map – Sydney Metro Area layer. She spent hours exploring it online, identifying candidate sites before leaving her desk. The map enabled her to scan Northern Sydney, identify and pinpoint vegetation communities, and shortlist locations to investigate. What would have taken months of fieldwork was compressed into a research planning process she could complete from her desk.

"It gave me all my sites to go visit," she says. "I narrowed down the locations I'd visit using the mapping, and I ended up with forty-five sites across Northern Sydney."

Ground truthing: where data meets reality

Charlotte is clear-eyed about the limits of any environmental dataset. Once she had a shortlist of locations from SEED, she would head out to ground truth them, checking whether what was mapped actually matched what was on the ground. The map got her to the right suburb, the right reserve, and the right section of bushland. The finer details, though, are where nature's complexity takes over.

"Natural phenomena are never actually that easy to categorise," she explains. "If the map said a reserve had my vegetation type, it would always have it – it was accurate to that degree. But when you got there, you'd narrow it down further yourself."

In fact, one of Charlotte's key PhD findings emerged directly from this tension between mapped data and lived observation: some urban bushland technically classified as Sydney Sandstone Dry Sclerophyll Forest had quietly shifted into something different: a wetter, transitional community due to the subtle effects of urbanisation. The map reflects a snapshot, but the bush keeps evolving.

New ways of working: SEED in the design classroom

Perhaps the most unexpected dimension of Charlotte's SEED story is where it has taken the platform next — from her PhD, into classrooms of landscape architecture students.

Charlotte now lectures botany and ecology to design students at UTS, and SEED has become a core part of how she teaches. Both subjects require students to spend time in an urban bushland reserve. Students draw it, learn its species, and understand its structure. Before they go, she points them to SEED. 

This is an emerging use case for the SEED portal. These aren’t environmental science students; they're designers - visual, creative, and often new to scientific ways of understanding the natural world. It shows what’s possible when environmental data is open and accessible. 

"We encourage them to use SEED to figure out which plant community they're dealing with," Charlotte says. "It gets them most of the way there."

The Sydney Metro vegetation layer does more than name what's there. It connects plant communities to underlying geology, soil type, water, aspect, and slope. The environmental variables that explain why specific combinations of species grow in a particular place. For students who might otherwise see bushland as a backdrop, it becomes a starting point for thinking about the land they’re designing for. 

"It's a unique combination of plant species that supports a unique combination of fauna. It's not all just a massive green."

The hope is that these future landscape architects carry that understanding into their careers, turning to SEED when they receive a project brief.

"They can go on to SEED, look at the physical location of their project, see what remnant vegetation is around there or what should have been there, and use that to inform a design," Charlotte says.

Some already are. Architecture graduates from the program have reported back that they now recommend native planting schemes to clients after learning about the local ecology.

"SEED is a jumping off point. It gets you to the right place and helps you understand what you are seeing when you get there. For landscape architects, there's a lot of potential in having an easy tool to look at what vegetation should be there."

Dr Charlotte Simpson-Young, Environmental Scientist and Lecturer, UTS

But for Charlotte, the value of SEED extends beyond her own research and the classroom. It's about closing the gap between people and the natural world they move through every day. Most people, she says, don't realise how deeply nature is woven into how we live. In our art, our storytelling, and our built environment. That's exactly where a platform like SEED comes in. 

"My ultimate goal is to try and fix plant blindness, and SEED helps me do that."

Dr Charlotte Simpson-Young, Plant Ecologist and Lecturer, UTS

It functions not just as a research tool, but as a way to help more people understand what they're looking at when they step into the bush.