Wild Plants of Victoria

The Wild Plants of Victoria is an easy-to-use guide to the plants of Victoria. It contains descriptions and identification aids to virtually all the vascular plants that live in the wild in this state. Its faunal equivalent is Wild Animals of Victoria.

The distribution data is derived from our front line database, the Victorian Flora Information System (FIS) the principal botanical database used by the Victorian Department of Sustainability and Environment (DSE).

All records in the databases have been summarised in a grid system with individual grid cells of dimensions 10 minutes longitude x 10 minute latitude, which, in Victoria, translates to grids which are 15 x 18 km (an area of about 270 km²). There are about 960 10-minute grids that cover Victoria. There are nearly 370,000 10-minute grid records in Wild Plants of Victoria.

There are three basic functions for Wild Plants of Victoria for which the software and database structures are optimised.

Looking up a plant species
The packages show, at a glance, the names, classification and conservation status of all 4418 vascular plant species for Victoria. Each species has a plain English description and most are represented by one or more colour photographs. You can find the names by typing in an abbreviation (e.g. Euc cad for Eucalyptus cadens) or an old name (e.g. entering Helichrysum dendroideum will find the new name Ozothamnus ferrugineus) and even the odd misspelling will be catered for. Names can be viewed in alphabetic order of common or scientific name. [More]

Find the distribution of any species
Once you have found the species you are looking for you may, with a single mouse-click, plot its distribution on any one of a series of 1:1,000,000 maps of Victoria. The themes for these maps include parks and public land, topography, climate, local government, bioregions etc. Each of the maps can be printed or exported as Windows Metafiles for use in word documents or other desktop publication packages. [More]

Finding all plant species for any area
You may load any of the maps and, using simple point-and-click methods, determine an area on that map to search. There is a series of higher-resolution satellite map images to aid in the location of your search grids. Once the area has been defined a single mouse-click will find all the species recorded for that area and the date of the most recent record. The resulting list can then be printed, exported or queried further. [More]