Wild Things of Victoria

The Wild Plants and Animals of Victoria packages are easy-to-use guides to the plants and animals of Victoria. They contain descriptions and identification aids to virtually all the vascular plants, mammals, birds, reptiles and frogs that live in the wild in this state. The two main packages are Wild Plants of Victoria and Wild Animals of Victoria (and Wild Birds of Victoria which is a subset of Wild Animals) there are also regional and local packages. If none of the off-the-shelf packages meet your needs Viridans offers a service where the customer can choose the area for a tailor-made local field guide and ecological assessment.

The distribution data is derived from our front line databases, the Victorian Flora Information System (FIS) and the Victorian Fauna Database (VFD), the principal databases 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 and a little over 170,000 records in Wild Animals of Victoria.

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

Looking up an animal or plant species
The packages show, at a glance, the names, classification and conservation status of all 4418 vascular plant species or 780 mammal, bird, reptile and frog species recorded 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, Gr fal for Grey Falcon) or an old name (e.g. entering Helichrysum dendroideum will find the new name Ozothamnus ferrugineus, entering Blue Wren will find the current name Superb Fairy-wren) 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 animal or 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]