Illustrated Flora and Fauna
Information Systems
of Victoria

High-Resolution Interactive Atlases and Field Guides
to Plants and Animals of Victoria for Windows or the Web
Victorian Biota
Victoria is the southern-most state on the Australian mainland.  It is approximately 240,000 km2 in area and lies between -34° to -39° south, and 141° to 150° east.  Which puts on the same latitude as central Argentina in the southern hemisphere, and Spain, Greece, Turkey and California in the northern hemisphere.
Flora
Approximately 5300 species, subspecies and varieties of vascular plants are recognised as growing wild in the state, of which about 4000 are native and 1300 have been introduced since 1788.  Victoria has an especially rich orchid (401 species), eucalypt (176) and wattle (149) flora.  Thirty six species are now considered to be extinct in the wild.
Fauna
About 900 species of mammals (153), birds (498), reptiles (126), frogs (42) and freshwater fish (87) live in the wild, of which about 70 species have arrived (not all have been introduced by humans) since European settlement. Some of these are amongst the most widespread and abundant animals in the state - e.g. European Rabbit, Common Starting, Brown Trout. Twenty-eight species, mainly mammals, are considered to be extinct in the wild.
Access Anywhere
The Flora and Fauna Informations Systems of Victoria packages are easy-to-use Windows or Web-based guides to the plants and animals of Victoria. They contain descriptions, photographs, drawings, identification aids and distribution data for virtually all species of vascular plants, mammals (including whales and dolphins), birds, reptiles, frogs and freshwater fish (and selected invertebrates) that live in the wild in this state.

The Windows versions are compatible with Windows 7, 8 and 10 and run from a USB Flash Drive or SD Card so they are completely portable and can be installed in a few seconds on any modern Windows-based computer.

The Web-based versions can be accessed from any Web-linked computer (tested on Windows and iOS), iPad or Android tablet.  They have been developed specifically for Chrome and Safari but will run on most other browsers (tested with Microsoft Edge, Internet Explorer 9, 10 and 11, Firefox and Opera).

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

Looking up a plant or animal species
The packages show, at a glance, the names, classification and conservation status of 5300 vascular plant species or 1100 animal species recorded for Victoria. Each species has a plain English description and most are represented by one or more colour photographs or drawings. You can find a species by typing in a scientific name or a common name (full name or abbreviation), you can even enter an old, out of date, name and there is a good chance the correct species will be found. All species in each database are displayed on-screen in a simple scroll-through table which can be navigated with the aid of single-letter jumps.  The list can be filtered, with a single mouse-click/screen-touch, to show only those which are native, introduced or rare.  The same process can limit the display to selected species types - such as mammals, fish, orchids, grasses, trees (there are currently six animal and ten plant filters).
 
Find the distribution of any species
Once you have found the species you are looking for you may, with a mouse-click/screen-touch, plot its distribution - as a series of 10 x 10 minute, latitude-longitude grids (each about 270 km2) and, at higher resolution, individual recording sites, marked as small, red circles - on a map of Victoria. Both Windows and Web versions display a map showing land-use (parks, public land) towns and geographic features. 

Finding all plant or animal species for any area
You may use a Viridans map-base with the Windows or Web versions to search any area for all the plant or animal species.  The search tools for the  include a facility to draw a polygon or circle on the map and a gazetteer of place names or a geo-code reference to find the selected region. The search result is displayed in an identical format to the display for all species and the filters all work in the same way.