0000000000146242
AUTHOR
F Attorre
The habitat monitoring under article 17 of the 92/43/eec Directive in Italy: the contribution of vegetation science
The 4th National Report ex Art. 17 of the 92/43/EEC Directive in Italy (period 2013-2018) will try to fill a number of gaps still affecting the former versions of the Italian Reports, where territorial data were still missing for large parts of the country and the assessment was mostly based on the use of the expert opinion. Similar inconsistencies also emerged in other European countries (State of nature in the EU, EEA 2015). In order to reach this aim, a nationally shared protocol for monitoring the vegetation-based Annex I Habitats is currently under development. The most prominent issues addressed by the ongoing project are: i) fixing standardized, updated and scientifically grounded me…
VegItaly: Technical features, crucial issues and some solutions
VegItaly is at present the largest Italian vegetation database. It is the result of a collaborative project aspiring to represent a major reference for the Italian vegetation scientists. The paper emphasizes its benefits for phytosociological data management and describes the solutions adopted to solve several technical problems, like the treatment of different vegetation stratification systems, the conversion of vegetation cover values, taxonomic and syntaxonomic issues, data import and access. The structure of the taxonomic list produced to support the storing of data is described. It allows an easy management of synonymic relationships and is constantly updated according to new publicati…
Classifying plant communities and mapping their potential distribution using very large, heterogeneous, georeferenced datasets: the case study of the forest vegetation in the Italian peninsula.
In recent years, the scientific community has made significant efforts in order to create georeferenced vegetation databases (Global Index of Vegetation Plot Databases). These databases are useful to carry out assessments of the state of bio diversity, conservation of species and habitats, dispersion of alien species and as a support for the planning of land and protected areas. In this context, Italy has given birth to its own project called VegItaly, coordinated by the Italian Society of Vegetation Science and conducted by several research groups, in order to develop a uniform database for the entire country. Within this framework we have created a georeferenced database of phytosociolo…
The Braun-Blanquet project: evaluating and characterizing European vegetation alliances
European tradition on vegetation classification provides an extraordinary legacy for understanding biodiversity. However, this classification lacks explicit data on vegetation attributes, especially if we extend national or regional concepts to a continental perspective. An additional effort for evaluating and characterizing European vegetation types is therefore needed, and the data contained in vegeta tion databases are probably the main tool for these purposes. The BraunBlanquet project is an initiative of the European Vegetation Survey for characterizing veg etation alliances across Europe. By analyzing more than 500,000 vegetation plots from 22 European countries, we developed a fra…