A National Vegetation Plot Database for Great Britain

Marshall, Zeke and Wood, Claire and Mountford, Ed and Rodwell, John and Strachan, Ian and Pescott, Oli and Tatarenko, Irina and Hodgson, John and Walker, Kevin and Latham, James and Maskell, Lindsay and Britton, Andrea J. and Pakeman, Robin J. and Dargie, Tom and Mitchell, Ruth and Jones, Laurence and Hester, Alison and Ross, Louise and Dalrymple, Sarah and Stevens, Carly and Rowe, Ed and McCullagh, Frances and Willis, Stephen and Marrs, Rob and Norton, Lisa and Smart, Simon M. (2025) A National Vegetation Plot Database for Great Britain. Vegetation Classification and Survey, 6. pp. 181-190. ISSN 2683-0671

Abstract

The GBNVPD (GIVD-code EU-GB-007) is the new centralised repository for the collection and storage of standardised vegetation plot data in Great Britain and the Crown Dependencies. The initial version of the GBNVPD (v1.0) described in this long database report comprises data from 63 individual sources and contains 277,070 samples from 200,733 plots, with a total of 4,463,300 occurrences of 4,086 accepted taxa (3,464 accepted species), surveyed between 1949 and 2024. Of the 63 constituent datasets 52 are newly submitted to the EVA and 9 to ReSurveyEurope. The database is available under a discretionary mixed-access regime and will be maintained and updated continuously in response to further digitisation of historic paper records, collection of pre-existing digitised survey data, and addition of future survey data. Abbreviations: EVA = European Vegetation Archive; GB = Great Britain; GBNVPD = National Vegetation Plot Database for Great Britain and the Crown Dependencies; NVC = National Vegetation Classification; UKCEH = United Kingdom Centre for Ecology and Hydrology; UKSI = United Kingdom Species Inventory.