Crawford, Isobel Louise   (1948 - )

Born in Canberra, and educated there at ANU (French and History), UC (Dip. Lib.; B. Appl. Sci. in Vegetation and Wildlife Management).

Important childhood influences were walks led by Nancy Burbidge for the National Parks Association of the ACT (which NTB had initiated), growing up in her mother Jean's garden, the earliest private Canberra garden of Australian plants, roaming through the not yet open Australian National Botanic Gardens under the watchful eye of the Scots overseer, Stan Kirby, and walking and horse riding on Black Mountain and at 'Wolgal', the Hurdle Creek farm of the Gilmour family.

While working in the CSIRO Forest Research Library in the early 1980s, Isobel joined a field trip to survey vegetation on Evans Head and was amazed to hear a local doctor call out the name of each plant species he saw. She immediately decided that that was what she wanted to learn to do.

While helping to run the Rotamah Island Bird Observatory in the mid 1980s, Isobel started to collect plants, and endeavoured to collect every species on this small Gippsland Lakes island, for MEL with duplicates for ANBG. Jim Willis and Jane and Malcolm Calder were important mentors at this time. Subsequently surveying birds for one of the Victorian Pre-logging teams cemented her interest in biological survey work.

Isobel ran a very successful botanical consultancy, somewhat grandiosely titled 'Australian Botanical Surveys', from 1991 until retiring in 2018. She specialised in grasslands, concentrating on grasses, sedges and rushes, and only rarely strayed outside NSW. Since then, she has been helping ACT park care groups with plant ids, keeping an eye out for new weed species for the ACT list, and running plant oriented walks for the National Parks Association of the ACT. Future projects include preparing voucher-based plant lists for Namadgi National Park, and new nature reserves and national parks in NSW.

Major collecting sites:
- Rotamah Island, Gippsland Lakes, Victoria;
- Glen Allen, 17 km NNE of Bibbenluke, ST NSW;
- Tantawangalo, ST NSW;
- Araluen Valley, SC NSW;
- Namadgi National Park, in particular Naas and Gudgenby Valleys;
- Private land on CWS and NWS of NSW.

Number of field book records (June 2022): 10483
Number of databased collections in CANB: 9399

Distribution of herbarium specimens:
- Australia: AD, BRI. CANB, HO, MEL, NE, NSW, PERTH.
- Overseas: K, Mo, WSU.

Source: pers.com. I.L. Crawford (2022)
Portrait Photo: 1999, M.Fagg.

Collecting localities for 'Crawford, I.' from AVH (2022)

Data from 13,179 specimens