Seed banks play a vital role in maintaining plant diversity, especially in highly unpredictable environments such as arid and semi-arid floodplains.  In such systems floods and droughts tend to be extreme and periods between floods tend toward severe aridity.  A significant ecological filter that will determine the overall vegetation structure in these hydrologically unpredictable floodplain plant communities would include the “regeneration niche” which would include the various life history strategies that plants will have to enable them to recruit periodically when conditions are favourable such as significant and persistent seed banks.  In semi-arid floodplain systems these seed banks are often within the soil profile but can also be held in above-ground litter, including animal (e.g. kangaroo) scats.  In order to examine the germinable seed abundance, and thus the potential seed banks across different hydrological settings we collected soil, litter and animal scat samples from 28 floodplain sites across the semi-arid northern Murray Darling Basin. Samples were subsequently re-wetand kept moist, with germination  recorded.  The results of the first four months of this regeneration experiment are presented and interpreted in relation to background environmental settings, including density of ground-cover and hydrological history.  All three potential seed-banks supported a diverse array of plants including, grasses, sedges, forbs, herbs and woody plants, including coolibah (Eucalyptus coolabah), river cooba (Acacia stenophylla) and weeping myall (Acacia pendula).  In terms of species richness, litter tended to have a higher numbers of species, followed by soil, then scats (which were predominantly grasses and forbs).