Start a species list
The most valuable record you can hold is a list of what grows on your place. Start it now, on iNaturalist, and build it across the seasons.
You don’t need to identify anything. That is the part that stops people before they begin. Walk your block, and whenever you see something in flower that you don’t recognise, photograph it — whole plant, leaves, and the flower — and post it. The app suggests a name and other people confirm or correct it. Your job is to capture an example, not to know what it is.
Walk it seasonally. Most plants are only identifiable while they are flowering, and they don’t all flower at once.12 A walk each season for a couple of years turns up things a single spring walk never will. Section 3.2 has the detail on photographing plants so they can actually be identified.
What it gives you later
Zoom to your property on iNaturalist and you have every species anyone has recorded there. Print it off and it becomes a checklist: after a fire, walk the block and tick off what comes back.
What is still unticked after two or three seasons answers the question that matters — not what returned, but what didn’t. That is what decides whether replanting is warranted (4.9), and it is not a question you can answer from memory.
It works the other way too. Anything you find that is not on your list is new, and after a fire a new plant is either a fire-cued germinator that has been waiting in the soil for decades3 (2.2) or a weed worth acting on early (4.2).
For a head start on what to look for, the Atlas of Living Australia will give you a checklist of everything recorded in the country around you — section 2.2 explains how. It is a prompt rather than a record of your block.
