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…

National vegetation databases: the case of VegItaly.

European Vegetation Archive: now EVA really starts!

European Vegetation Archive (EVA) was announced as a new initiative of the European Vegetation Survey at the EVS Meeting in Vienna in 2012. The aim of EVA is to create a centralized database of European vegetation plots by storing copies of national and regional databases on a single software platform using a unified taxonomic reference database. EVA does not affect the ongoing independent developments of source data­ bases and it guarantees that data property rights of the original contributors are re­ spected. EVA Data Property and Governance Rules were approved and the EVA website (www.euroveg.org/eva­database) was established in 2012. Since then several European vegetation­plot database…

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…