Dear colleagues, if you deal with vegetation databases, i.e. you either host a private vegetation database or you are involved in an institutional one, the following information probably is relevant to you:
In connection with the 9th international Meeting on Vegetation Databases under the motto "Vegetation Databases and Climate Change" (26-28 February 2010, Hamburg, Germany, http://www.botanik.uni-greifswald.de/workshop2010.html), we (i.e. NetPhyD, IAVS, and colleagues from the University of Greifswald and Hamburg) plan the release of two comprehensive information sources on vegetation databases worldwide: * In the conference volume to be published as Special Issue of "Biodiversity and Ecology" (print and open-accesss online) we will publish reports on existing vegetation databases (one-page data papers or full articles), each with a standardised half-page fact sheet. * We will use the data collected for the conference volume to start an online open-access World Metadatabase on Vegetation Databases that will be updated continuously after the launch. With these two interconnected products, we want to raise the awareness about huge amount of valuable data already available in vegetation databases, stimulate their use and give adequate credit to their originators (by providing a citable reference). We thus cordially invite you to provide the information on your vegetation database both to the print volume and the metadatabase. If you are willing to do so (you don´t need to participate in the conference for this), please register your database at http://www.botanik.uni-greifswald.de/373.html Please do so even if your database should belong to the very few vegetation databases that previously have been presented in international journal publications. We then will inform you as soon as the online upload facility is available in the internet with which we will collect the data for both the fact sheets of the print publication and the online metadatabase. On the mentioned homepage, you find all relevant further information, in particular: * Definition of what we consider as vegetation database + contact data of the Steering Committee * Example how a one-page data paper in the print volume could look like (selection of fields and layout are preliminary) Help us to have 100+ databases be presented in the print volume and the World Metadatabase. The deadline for inclusion in the attractive print volume is 31 March 2010, while upload of additional databases to the World Metadatabase will remain possible later on. We are looking forward to your contribution! With kind regards, Jürgen Dengler (in the name of the Steering Committee for the World Metadatabase on Vegetation Databases) -- Dr. Jürgen Dengler Plant Systematics and Vegetation Ecology Biocentre Klein Flottbek University of Hamburg Ohnhorststr. 18 22609 Hamburg GERMANY Phone: +49-40-42816-403 Phone private: +49-4131-935038 Fax: +49-40-42816-539 E-mail: [email protected] URL: http://www.biologie.uni-hamburg.de/bzf/fbha063/fbha063.htm European Dry Grassland Group: http://www.edgg.org Conference "Vegetation Databases and Climate Change": http://www.botanik.uni-greifswald.de/workshop2010.html
