Project number one

The first piece of work we undertook was to prepare a report on the management of the Ground Parrot in Victoria, you can view the report here. 

The impetus for this work was based on the advice of a report co-authored by Charles (Meredith and Isles 1980) during his time at the Fisheries and Wildlife Division at what is now the Victorian Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action. 

Biosis Team Leader – Zoology Mark Venosta, who has been with the company for 22 years, said that project number one “is a remarkable work in comparison to our current work in that it was hand typed and bound. The mapping is also hand done and hand coloured, as are the tables. Rather than using track changes, reports of this era include notations in the final copy to highlight any errors and how to read figures where errors were found after printing.” 

Biosis Team Leader – GIS (Victoria) Sally Mitchell, who is about to celebrate 25 years with the company, adds that “maps for consultant reports were being made manually with a combination of hand drawings and thin stick-on black tape, and the layers I now use in GIS were layers of tracing paper with these hand drawn features on them, over topographic paper basemaps.” 

Images above: Long Swamp sedgelands as depicted in Biosis' first report in 1983 (left) and using GIS in 2023 (right).

Also notable in this report, from the perspective of our company’s history, is the acknowledgement of Robert (Bob) Baird for assisting in the field. Bob eventually came to work at Biosis in 1996 and went on to be a Director of Biosis from 2011 until his recent retirement. 

Biosis went on to author several other technical reports on the Ground Parrot for the state government in 1987 and 1991. 

Changes in field technology

Biosis recently recorded Ground Parrot during surveys of Long Swamp in SW Victoria, in the same location surveyed in this original work. 

In that survey we were aided by numerous technological advances including field maps on a tablet, electronic field guides, and call playback from an mp3 player via Bluetooth speaker. The species cryptic calls were recorded via mobile phone for further analysis and we confirmed the calls within minutes via text message to a relevant species expert. 

Consulting at Biosis today certainly happens at a different pace than it initially did!