Dear colleagues, I am writing you today as a member of the international Steering Committee of the newly established Global Index of Vegetation-Plot Databases (GIVD), which is available online at:
http://www.botanik.uni-greifswald.de/givd.html This major initiative, which is supported among others by the Ecoinformatics Working Group of the International Association for Vegetation Science (IAVS), aims at making metadata on as many vegetation databases around the world as possible available on one single platform in order to raise the awareness about this underestimated source of high-quality biodiversity data and to facilitate their use in joint research projects. Additionally, all databases that are registered by a certain date (see below) will have the opportunity to publish a "Short Database Report" (1-page with standardised information automatically generated from the database, without peer-review) or "Long Database Report" (up to 20 pages, with peer review) in the international (print and open access) journal "Biodiversity & Ecology" for free (similar to the concept of "Data papers" in "Ecology"). Already 78 databases from around the world and representing more than 1,500,000 relevés have uploaded their metadata. Calculating with an average of 20 species per plot, this means that GIVD presently represents approx. 30 million species records, all with compositional data and most of them with precise location, with environmental and structural data, i.e. an invaluable source in ecoinformatics that has the potential to greatly contribute particularly to macroecological research but also to applied questions as well as to complement tradition plant species records available via GBIF (and related platforms). If you are interested in using the data registered in GIVD for your own research, we invite you to visit our homepage and test the search and analytical tools that are already there (we plan to extend the functionalities during the next time and hope for your suggestions). If you host a vegetation database yourself (big or small, private or institutional, emerging or finished), we kindly invite you to upload your metadata - it will take less than 30 minutes, but contribute much to the visibility of your database and provide you with a citable reference to your database via the Database Report in the international journal "Biodiversity & Ecology". While you can upload your data whenever you like, there are good reasons to do this soon as there are several relevant deadlines in the near future: 15 September 2010: data loaded by this date will be included in the meta-analysis for an article about the GIVD to be published in a Special Issue of "Applied Vegetation Science" on "Ecoinformatics and global change". Don´t miss that date because otherwise your country might appear white on the published global map of vegetation databases despite the existing data. 30 September 2010: you can publish a peer-reviewed "Long Database Report" in the Special Volume of Biodiversity & Ecology, where you may report on 4-20 full colour pages about the aims, the history, the concept, the content, and the applications of your database 15 October 2010: your metadata will be used to create automatically a 1-page "Short Database Report" to be published in Biodiversity & Ecology If you have any questions or suggestions do not hesitate to contact me. If you know of other similar databases not yet included in our list, could you either provide me details of who I should contact regarding these data or forward this information to them on my behalf? With kind regards, Jürgen Dengler in the name of the Steering Committee of the GIVD (Miquel de Cáceres [ES], Milan Chytrý [CZ], Jürgen Dengler [DE], Jörg Ewald [DE], Manfred Finckh [DE], Falko Glöckler [DE], Stephan Hennekens [NL], Florian Jansen [DE], Michael Lee [US], Laco Mucina [AU], Jens Oldeland [DE], Robert Peet [US], John Rodwell [UK], Joop Schaminée [NL], Nick Spencer [NZ]) -- Dr. Jürgen Dengler Biodiversity, Evolution and Ecology of Plants Biocentre Klein Flottbek and Botanical Garden 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] Skype: juergen.dengler URL: http://www.biologie.uni-hamburg.de/bzf/fbha063/fbha063_e.htm European Dry Grassland Group (EDGG): http://www.edgg.org Global Index of Vegetation-Plot Databases (GIVD): http://www.botanik.uni-greifswald.de/givd.html
