Growing interest in biodiversity and conservation has increased the demand for accurate and consistent identification of arthropods. Unfortunately, professional taxonomists are already overburdened and underfunded and their numbers are not increasing with significant speed to meet the demand. In an effort to bridge the gap between professional taxonomists and non-specialists by making the results of taxonomic research more accessible, we present a partially automated pattern recognition system utilizing artificial neural networks (ANNs). Various artificial neural networks were trained to identify spider species using only digital images of female genitalia, from which key shape information had been extracted by wavelet transform. Three different sized networks were evaluated based on their ability to discriminate a test set of six species to either the genus or the species level. The species represented three genera of the wolf spiders (Araneae: Lycosidae). The largest network achieved the highest accuracy, identifying specimens to the correct genus 100% of the time and to the correct species an average of 81% of the time. In addition, the networks were most accurate when identifying specimens in a hierarchical system, first to genus and then to species. This test system was surprisingly accurate considering the small size of our training set.

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The South Gippsland area of eastern Victoria is the most southerly part of the Australian mainland and is contained within the Bassian zoogeographic subregion. The survey area contains most Bassian environments, including ranges, river flats, swamps, coastal plains, mountainous promontories and continental islands. The area was settled in the mid 180()s and much of the native vegetation was cleared for farming. The status (both present and historical) of 375 vertebrate taxa, 50 mammals, 285 birds, 25 reptiles and 15 amphibians is discussed in terms of distribution, habitat and abundance. As a result of European settlement, 4 mammal species are now extinct and several bird species are extinct or rare. Wildlife populations in the area now appear relatively stable and are catered for by six National Parks and Wildlife Reserves. Palaeozoic rocks and forming cliffs up to 75 m at the coast but slopes down as an undulating plateau further inland; and Wilsons Promontory, which was a granitic island but is now linked to the mainland by an accumulation of sand known as the Yanakie tie bar and forms a rugged mountainous promontory rising to 760 m. The continental islands near Wilsons Promontory are also granitic and are of similar origin. The low-level islands in the Snake 105

The Grampians