Image of The South African National Vegetation Database: History, Development, Applications, Problems and Future

The South African National Vegetation Database: History, Development, Applications, Problems and Future

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Southern Africa has been recognised as one of the most interesting and important areas of the
world from an ecological and evolutionary point of view. The establishment and development
of the National Vegetation Database (NVD) of South Africa enabled South Africa to contribute
to environmental planning and conservation management in this floristically unique region.
In this paper, we aim to provide an update on the development of the NVD since it was last
described, near its inception, more than a decade ago. The NVD was developed using the
Turboveg software environment, and currently comprises 46 697 vegetation plots (relevés)
sharing 11 690 plant taxa and containing 968 943 species occurrence records. The NVD was
primarily founded to serve vegetation classification and mapping goals but soon became
recognised as an important tool in conservation assessment and target setting. The NVD has
directly helped produce the National Vegetation Map, National Forest Type Classification,
South African National Biodiversity Assessment and Forest Type Conservation Assessment.
With further development of the NVD and more consistent handling of the legacy data (old
data sets), the current limitations regarding certain types of application of the data should be
significantly reduced. However, the use of the current NVD in multidisciplinary research has
certainly not been fully explored. With the availability of new pools of well-trained vegetation
surveyors, the NVD will continue to be purpose driven and serve the needs of biological
survey in pursuit of sustainable use of the vegetation and flora resources of the southern
African subcontinent.

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English
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Development
South Africa
South African National Vegetation Database
Conservation in regions
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