Funded by ARC-NZ Research Network for Vegetation Function and New Zealand Terrestrial and Freshwater Biodiversity Information Systems (TFBIS) programme.
Venue provided by the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center, Durham, North Carolina
Develop an international exchange standard and associated XML schema for vegetation plot data for adoption by the International Association for Vegetation Science and TDWG.
The primary impediment to large-scale sharing of vegetation data is lack of a recognized international exchange standard. An international exchange standard or schema for vegetation plot data (VPS) would make many more plots available. Certainly many organizations and researchers would benefit greatly by being able to exchange and share vegetation data. Database implementations differ among organizations and the cost of developing multiple applications for system-specificdata exchange can be prohibitive. This type of problem is widely acknowledged and organizations like CODATA and FGDC consider the fostering of such standards a primary mission. Some work on exchange standards has been done by the biodiversity community and is represented in schemas such as Darwin Core v.2 and OBIS Schema v. 1.0. These allow exchange of spatial and temporal occurrence information for individual specimens. However, these specimen-based approaches are not adequate for community sampling. At the first International Association for Vegetation Science (IAVS) Ecoinformatics Working Group meeting in 2003, vegetation scientists from 22 countries attended and unanimously endorsed creation by IAVS of an international exchange standard. The Governing Council of IAVS has invited us to work with interested colleagues to develop a standard for approval and endorsement by IAVS. In this spirit we seek to design a schema for vegetation plot data that is maximally compatible with existing standards and is useful for community-based co-occurrence sampling for many types of organisms (e.g., intertidal zone plots, subtidal benthic plots and transects) while still meeting the unique needs of vegetation community sampling.
Introduction
Existing vegetation plot database systems
Related initiatives