Editors' Choice Paper of the third quarter of 2022

The introduction of the Alma Mater Studiorum – University of Bologna vegetation database (abbreviated as the AMS-VegBank), published as a Long Database Report became the third article to be recognised as an Editors' Choice Paper by the editors of the Vegetation Classification and Survey (VCS) this year.

The study is authored by an Italian research team, led by Nicola Alessi, and involves scientists from the University of Bologna, the Italian Institute for Environmental Protection and Research, LifeWatch Italy, the University of Camerino and GREENARCO S.r.l.

At the time of the publication of the paper, the AMS-VegBank database includes 337,799 occurrence data of vascular plant species, belonging to many different habitat types.

“The large amount of historical plots available for the country not previously included in existing databases, combined with the constant action to improve the georeferencing of existing data and the addition of new data, highlight the uniqueness of this database,” note the researchers.

“AMS-VegBank represents an important tool for studying plant biodiversity within the context of continental and global vegetation plot databases,” they add.

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The paper is included in the permanent special collection at VCS: Ecoinformatics, launched to bring together vegetation-plot databases and other ecoinformatics data sources relevant for vegetation classification, as well as concepts and methods for their use.

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