VegItaly: Technical features, crucial issues and some solutions

Abstract

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 publications and revisions. Issues related to data import from different formats have been solved by developing assistant software VegImport and TabImport, which are based on the most used formats in vegetation plot archiving. Bibliographic sources are managed according to the LISY standard and include descriptive geographic information, bibliographic and syntaxonomic reference. Distinct data access regimes can be selected by VegItaly's users: visible, partly visible, invisible. Compared with the original project outline, many fundamental parts of the database structure have been fully built up, although several utilities still have to be developed or improved.