Working towards a distributed model of vegetation plot databases to support vegetation ecology in North America

Background/Question/Methods

Recently, a team of international vegetation scientists have created a Global Index of Vegetation Databases (GIVD).  Central to the goal of GIVD is to advance the sharing, archiving, and disseminating field plot data, the fundamental data required for describing and understanding vegetation types and explore their ecology.  In the U.S., a key contributor to this effort has been VegBank, a vegetation plot database of the Panel on Vegetation Classification of the Ecological Society of America. VegBank is a stand-alone, Internet-accessible, vegetation plot archive designed to allow users to easily submit, search, view, annotate, cite, and download diverse types of vegetation data.  But, many state and federal agencies currently maintain their data in independent databases.  Given the need for institutions and organizations to maintain their own plot data, vegetation ecologists are in need of methods to share data.

Results/Conclusions

We explore the common data attributes needed to share vegetation data, and we summarize the opportunities to work towards a shared set of database attributes.  We demonstrate the utility of the distributed data model using a study on a specific ecosystem.