Asplenium listeri outside the Christmas Island National Park. Asplenium listeri Asplenium listeri, commonly known as the Christmas Island spleenwort, is a species of fern in the Aspleniaceae family. It is endemic to Christmas Island, an Australian territory in the north-eastern Indian Ocean. Its specific epithet honours British zoologist and plant collector Joseph Jackson Lister, who visited the island on in 1887 and was the first to collect a specimen. The spleenwort is a small, terrestrial, lithophytic fern with shortly creeping rhizomes, and with fronds up to 90 mm long held in a crown. Found only on Christmas Island, the fern is known
Plant cover Plant cover The abundances of plant species are often measured by plant cover, which is the relative area covered by different plant species in a small plot. Plant cover is not biased by the size and distributions of individuals, and is an important and often measured characteristic of the composition of plant communities. Plant cover data may be used to classify the studied plant community into a vegetation type, to test different ecological hypothesis on plant abundance, and in gradient studies, where the effects of different environmental gradients on the abundance of specific plant species are investigated. The most common