The German Working Group on Vegetation Databases is dedicated to the promotion of plot databanks, in order to facilitate application of botanical data, to open up new paths of analysis and to encourage exchange among scientists and practitioners. As a Section of the Network for Phytodiversity (NetPhyD), we coordinate activities concerning the stimulation, compilation, dissemination and utilisation of vegetation data in Germany and surrounding countries.

The 9th meeting in Hamburg was focussed on vegetation databases and climate change. Vegetation databanks are an indispensable tool in climate change research that deserves more attention by scientists and decision makers. Their vast legacy of historical and recent co-ocurrence data allow to study vegetation responses to climate at various scales and levels of complexity. The meeting comprised keynote lectures by Niklaus E. Zimmermann (WSL, Switzerland), Ingolf Kühn (UFZ, Germany) and Michael C. Rutherford (South African National Biodiversity Institute, South Africa), as well as five software workshops related to establishment and analyses of large databases.

More information: www.botanik.uni-greifswald.de/workshop2010.html