This ecoregion covers an area between Australia's east coast and the
Great Dividing Range, starting just above
Eden, New South Wales in the South Coast, which includes (parts of) the
Blue Mountains to the west
Sydney, and ending in south Queensland's
Border Ranges. The Sydney metropolitan area is transitional with regions such as the
greater west (or the
Cumberland Plain Woodland) being virtually excluded from this biome since it predominantly contains dry
sclerophyll, grassy woodlands and thus the region's vegetation community will be more similar to
Temperate grasslands (i.e.
savannahs). Though pockets of forested areas in Sydney, such as those in
The Hills Shire to the north and Sutherland Shire to the south, which are relatively wet, do have regions within them that are part of Eastern Australian temperate forests (such as the
Sydney Turpentine-Ironbark Forest and
Blue Gum High Forest). Eucalyptus communities meandering the coast in southern Queensland and northern New South Wales are usually wet sclerophyll wet forests, ranging from 30 percent to 70 percent closed canopy cover, with the understorey containing small broadleaved trees,
vines,
ferns and
shrubs. Both wet and dry sclerophyll forests are the most predominant vegetation communities in the coastal corridor of south-eastern Australia, and would receive less rainfall than the rainforest communities. Subtropical rainforest are complex closed-forests that are the most developed community in New South Wales, growing in warm, fecund sites having rainfall higher than 1,300 mm per year. They are predominantly found between the border of Queensland and New South Wales, near the
Gold Coast,
Coffs Harbour and
Byron Bay. Dry rainforests are low closed forests with irregular
canopy that occur in sites with lower rainfall, ranging from 600 mm to 1,100 mm annual rainfall, generally in parts of the Blue Mountains and also near
Narooma and
Moruya in the south coast. Dry rainforest was distributed in southeastern Queensland where it occupied about half a million hectares, though it has now been broadly cleared for
agriculture. There is a small dry rainforest community in southwestern
Sydney, near
Abbotsbury. Warm temperate rainforest are closed forests with far less diversity than the dry or subtropical rainforests, growing on low-nutrient soils. It is found scattered in the Blue Mountains,
Central Coast,
North Coast, the
Illawarra escarpment near
Wollongong and in isolated pockets in the
South Coast. The rainforest communities of this region exhibit ecological relations to other regions: the cool temperate rainforest is similar to the biome found in Tasmania, the warm temperate rainforest has links to the
North Island of
New Zealand, and the subtropical and dry regions are also found up north in the
Queensland tropical rain forests ecoregion. The Blue Mountains area has over 90 eucalypt taxa, or 13% of the global dispersion.
Biome groupings The ecoregion has a variety of vegetation communities in its scope: • Eucalyptus open forests (dry and wet sclerophyll forests) • Eucalyptus tall open forest • Eucalyptus open forest • Eucalyptus low open forest • Eucalyptus open grassy woodlands • Closed forests (
rainforests and vine thickets) • Subtropical rainforest • Littoral rainforest • Dry rainforest • Warm temperate/deciduous rainforest (southern and northern group) • Cool temperate rainforest • Western Vine Thickets To note, the open eucalypt forest is a broad, crescent-shaped vegetation community that is found from
Gladstone, Queensland to as far as
Quorn, South Australia in the southwest, which incorporates
Southeast Australia temperate forests in southern Victoria and the
Mediterranean woodlands in western Victoria and eastern
South Australia. ==Climate==