Reading the Countrya free field guide to Sunshine Coast ecology

Free classroom downloads

Take the diagrams home

The whole of Same Sky, Different Ground — and the 27 diagrams and maps made for it — free to download, print and use in classrooms, field stations and on the wall.

The diagrams were drawn one by one for this coast, and the maps are rendered from the state's own elevation and geology data — not clip art. Free for personal, classroom and community use under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 (credit the book, don't resell). Each is a print-ready PDF at a true 300 dpi. The diagrams trim landscape, about 28 cm wide, so they sit happily on A4. The maps are tall portrait sheets, 24 cm wide and 39 to 50 cm high, drawn to be printed big or scaled down to A4.

The whole book

Same Sky, Different Ground — free, in full

The diagrams and maps below come out of a book, and the book is free too: all nineteen chapters, from the reef to the range, with every map and every source. No account and no email address.

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EPUB reflows for phones and e-readers; the PDF keeps the fixed pages and colour maps, and prints well. More about the book →

The Great Gradient

The Great Gradient

The whole coast in one section — rainforest, gum forest, swamp, wallum, estuary and reef down a single slope. The spine of the whole thing.

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Landforms in section

Landforms in section

Range, foothills, floodplain, sand and sea in profile.

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How a sand podzol forms

How a sand podzol forms

How wallum sand bleaches white over thousands of years.

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Rainforest structure

Rainforest structure

Canopy, sub-canopy, understorey and floor.

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Estuary zonation

Estuary zonation

Seagrass, mangrove and saltmarsh, sorted by the tide.

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Wetland zonation

Wetland zonation

The zones of a paperbark swamp, open water to dry edge.

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How the dune lakes work

How the dune lakes work

Perched lakes and window lakes explained.

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Sea country

Sea country

Beach to boulder reef to open water, seagrass between.

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How fire draws the boundary

How fire draws the boundary

The hard line between eucalypt forest and rainforest.

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The volcanic hotspot track

The volcanic hotspot track

How the Glass House Mountains and hinterland peaks were built.

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Mount Ninderry cross-section

Mount Ninderry cross-section

The geological bones of one peak.

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The Reader's Year

The Reader's Year

A naturalist's seasonal wheel of the coast.

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The mending ground

The mending ground

Every hectare bought back, replanted, burnt on purpose or weeded across both councils, and the thirty years of Environment Levy behind it.

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What has been cleared

What has been cleared

Remnant vegetation against what stood here before, ecosystem by ecosystem. The land-cover change map.

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The intertidal coast

The intertidal coast

Mangrove, saltmarsh, seagrass and sand flat, mapped from satellite between the tides.

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The Sunshine Coast

The Sunshine Coast

Where everything is: Glass House Mountains to the Cooloola sand mass, with the places the book keeps returning to.

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The ecological zones

The ecological zones

The base map every chapter leans on — the coast sorted into the zones the gradient makes.

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The rock beneath

The rock beneath

The region's real geology from detailed state mapping. Everything else on this page is downstream of it.

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The land by its chemistry

The land by its chemistry

A gamma-ray view that sees past the vegetation to the ground itself. The quartz sand reads almost black.

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Clay and acid

Clay and acid

The gradient rule written in the soil: rich clay on the basalt hinterland, bottomless acid sand at the coast.

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Where the country burns

Where the country burns

Ten years of fire scars. The sand, wallum and dry eucalypt country carry nearly all of it.

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The same rain, different ground

The same rain, different ground

Rainfall barely changes across the coast. The ground changes enormously. That is the whole argument in one figure.

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The same rain

The same rain

Average annual rainfall, climbing gently from the coast to the range.

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Reef to range

Reef to range

The land relief carried out to sea with real bathymetry. The gradient does not stop at the beach.

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Freshwater held by the ground

Freshwater held by the ground

Where the paperbark and sedge swamps sit, and why they sit there.

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The reserved country

The reserved country

The conservation estate, clustered on the infertile ground nobody wanted to farm.

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What we do with the ground

What we do with the ground

The human footprint following the natural gradient: cane on the floodplain, houses on the sand, forest on the steep.

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Using these with a class or group? I'd love to know — get in touch. Want the whole story behind them? The book →