VegBank – a permanent, open-access archive for vegetation-plot data

Abstract

Rapid progress is being made in North American vegetation science through recent developments within the U.S. National Vegetation Classification (USNVC). Central to these advances are sharing, archiving, and disseminating field plot data, the fundamental data required for describing and understanding vegetation communities. VegBank (GIVD ID NA-US-002) is the vegetation plot database of the Panel on Vegetation Classification of the Ecological Society of America. VegBank is a stand-alone, Internetaccessible, vegetation plot archive designed to allow users to easily submit, search, view, annotate, cite, and download diverse types of vegetation data. The archive also includes embedded databases that contain classifications of vegetation and individual organisms, designed and implemented to track the many-to-many relationship betweens names and plant or community concepts, as well as alternative party perspectives on accepted taxa. The VegBank data model is also implemented in VegBranch, a desktop tool for data management and for uploading to and downloading from VegBank.