National vegetation databases: the case of VegItaly.

In the last decade, vegetation scientists were increasingly attracted by the use of huge data sets, in order to address emerging issues such as the severe risk of species, habitats and biodiversity loss. Indeed, large databases became essential for nature conservation. VegItaly (http://www.vegitaly.it; GIVD ID EU-IT-001) is a web geo-database built on opensource software, designed to archive, retrieve, analyze vegetation data and publish them on the web. It was born under the aegis of the Italian Society for Vegetation Science (SISV) as a collaborative project, thanks to the cooperation of a large group of scientists (currently more than 20 Italian Universities and Research Institutions). At present, more than 30,000 published or unpublished, public or private vegetation plots are stored in VegItaly, still far from being an exhaustive sample of the whole Italian biodiversity: some vegetation types are better represented than others (forests 34.68%, shrubs 5.68%, herbaceous vegetation 55.99%, unclassified 3.57%) and also their geographical distribution is not homogeneous across the national territory. However, the number of vegetation plots is rapidly increasing. As concerns taxonomic aspects, VegItaly is based on anArchive taxonomic Checklist, an on-line synonymized list of botanical species names, developed to support the botanical data banking and vegetation analysis, currently including 23,463 valid names and synonyms. Bibliographic sources are linked to LISY, the national bibliographic archive online developed in the 1990s, storing the syntaxonomic units of the Italian vegetation and the related published sources (currently including almost 3,400 bibliographic entries and more than 33,200 syntaxa, including synonyms). Some user-friendly tools have been developed to facilitate data upload (archiver, VegImport and TabImport). Designed for floristic and phytosociological data, VegItaly's main aim is to contribute to data archiving and sharing, offering the possibility to manage large data sets for statistical analysis on a wide geographic scale. At present, it represents a milestone in Italy in the field of vegetation science and stands as a standard management system for botanical data at the national level.