Hydrocotyl elegans, one of the 19 representatives of this genus occurring in Queensland.
Walked the dog through Greendale Park today, as we have done many times before, but came across a patch of Hydrocotyl growing in a damp swale. Immediately struck me as unusually glabrous, and turned out to be my first ever observation of H. elegans, a rather restricted range species endemic to Queensland and New South Wales. In fact, there are only 174 records on iNaturalist, and urban south-east Queensland is the global headquarters of its distribution (see map below). The skew of records towards to a heavily urbanised region is no doubt in part owing to the urbanised distribution of iNaturalist users, and this is a species with outlying populations west of Gladstone and in the Atherton Tablelands, which don’t really show up on the map. There seems to have been some taxonomic confusion, and I can’t quite piece together the full story, but see https://doi.org/10.54102/ajt for a recent treatment.
This all brings home to me that even something as simple as a walk in a local park can generate biodiversity records that contribute meaningfully to our accumulating understanding of nature.
Records of Hydrocotyl elegans in iNaturalist up to 30 Aug 2025.