Victorian Butterflies and their Food Plants

Victorian Butterflies and their Food Plants (VBFP) is an easy-to-use guide to the butterflies of Victoria and the plants that they require for their caterpillars. It contains descriptions and identification aids to all species that live in the wild in this state. Its floral equivalent is Wild Plants of Victoria and the vertebrate equivalent is Wild Animals of Victoria..

The distribution data is derived from work carried out by the amateur entomologists Nigel Quick and David Crosby with additions from Viridans sources.

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 over 8,000 records in VBFP.

There are four basic functions for VBFP for which the software and database structures are optimised.

Looking up a butterfly species
The packages show, at a glance, the names, classification and conservation status of all 128 butterfly species recorded for Victoria. Each species has a plain English description and most are represented by one or more colour photograph. You can find the names by typing in an abbreviation of the scientific name (e.g. Grap mac for Graphium macleayanum) or a common name (e.g. entering entering les wan will find the Lesser Wanderer) 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 butterflies 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]

Identifying the food plants used by butterflies
There are 235 species of Victorian vascular plant that are utilised by the food-specialist butterfly caterpillars. There are photographs, descriptions, ecological information, identification aids and much more for all species of food plants. [More]