GIVD - Global Index of Vegetation-Plot Databases
Aims: GIVD is a searchable metadatabase that aims at providing up-to-date online information on existing vegetation-plot databases worldwide. Information on these databases are provided in a standardised manner, including owner and contact data, data format, and ways to use the data as well as scope and spatial coverage of database, temporal extent, plot sizes used and environmental parameters contained. GIVD also provides a permanent unique identifier for each registered database (such as EU-DE-001) and offers database owners to publish Long and Short Database Reports (depending on the size of the database) in international journals that contain a GIVD-edited standardise Fact Sheet. These Database Reports allow giving credit via a paper citation to the creators and contributors of a vegetation-plot database whenever plot data are used. A first large series of Database Reports was published 2012 in Biodiversity & Ecology. Since 2015, the Ecoinformatics section of Phytocoenologia has taken over the function of publication partner of GIVD.
Foundation: 2010 by Jürgen Dengler & Florian Jansen
Steering Committee: Fabio Attore (IT), Flavia Landucci (IT), Florian Jansen (DE), Gabriela Lopez-Gonzalez (UK), Jürgen Dengler (DE) & Wieger Wamelink (NL)
Current content (January 2017): 241 databases with 3,098,502 registered vegetation plots
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