The vegetation relevés stored electronically in the Czech National Phytosociological Database are reviewed. The database was established in 1996, with the central database located in the Department of Botany, Masaryk University, Brno (www.sci.muni.cz/botany/database.htm). On 15 November 2002 this central database contained 54,310 relevés from the Czech Republic, collected by 332 authors between 1922–2002. Ca. 54% of the relevés were taken from published papers or monographs, 21% from theses and the rest from various unpublished reports and field-books. These relevés include 1,259,008 records of individual plant species. Territorial coverage of the country by the reléves is irregular as the areas with attractive natural or semi-natural vegetation are more intensively sampled, with gaps in coverage of less attractive or poorly accessible areas. Most relevés are of broad-leaved deciduous forests (Querco-Fagetea), meadows (Molinio-Arrhenatheretea), dry grasslands (Festuco-Brometea), and marsh grasslands (Phragmito-Magnocaricetea). The quality of the data is discussed, such as researcher bias, preferential selection of sampling sites, spatial autocorrelation and missing values for some data elements.
During the last decade many electronic databases of vegetation plots, mainly phytosociological relevés, were established in different European countries. These databases contain information which is extremely valuable for both testing various macroecological hypotheses and for nature conservation surveying or monitoring. The aim of this paper is to provide estimates of the number of vegetation plots there are in Europe, how many are stored in an electronic format and to assess their distribution across European countries and regions.We sent a questionnaire to the managers of national or regional databases of vegetation plots and other prominent vegetation ecologists. Meta-data obtained in this way indicate that there are > 4,300,000 vegetation-plot records in Europe, of which > 1,800,000 are already stored electronically. Of the electronic plots, 60% are stored in TURBOVEG databases. Most plot records probably exist in Germany, the Netherlands, France, Poland, Spain, Czech Republic, Italy, UK, Switzerland and Austria. The largest numbers of plots per unit area are in the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark and countries of central Europe. The most computerized plots per country exist in the Netherlands (600,000), followed by France, the Czech Republic and the UK. Due to its strong phytosociological tradition, Europe has many more vegetation plots than any other part of the world. This wealth of unique ecological information is a challenge for future biodiversity studies. With the alarming loss in biodiversity and environmental problems like global warming and ongoing changes in land use, there is an urgent need for wide-scale scientific and applied vegetation research. Developments of information systems such as SynBioSys Europe and facilitation of data flow between the national and regional databases should make it easier to use these vegetation-plot data.