Towards the Hellenic National Vegetation Database: VegHellas

Abstract Recently a new initiative was launched aimed at building a central database to hold all so far published and unpublished releves available in Greece – the Hellenic National Vegetation Database (VegHellas). All literature sources, widely dispersed and often poorly accessible, containing vegetation releves from Greece have been compiled and stored in a bibliographical database. To date this database houses more than 200 references. Between 1944 and 2011, more than 30,000 phytosociological releves were made in Greece, and these are stored either as hard copies or electronically. Currently, data on more than 22,000 vegetation plots, entered in the TURBOVEG database system are georeferenced to a certain level of precision (e.g. mountain range, mountain peak, specific locality, island, phytogeographical region, grid cell 10 x 10 km etc.). Plant nomenclatural problems, such as the use of different synonyms for the same taxon by different researchers in different years will be solved using the standardized Hellenic Vascular Plant Checklist (HVPC), currently close to completion. This checklist will offer a scientific basis for consistent nomenclatural reference. A database with chorological, life-form and other plant-trait information for each taxon, will also be linked to the vegetation-plot records. This will allow using VegHellas not only as a tool for the formulation of a national system of vegetation classification, but also in multiple applications in ecological, biogeographical and applied environmental research. The preparation of a syntaxonomic overview of the vegetation of Greece is currently in progress. Following the basic principles of the checklist of high-rank syntaxa of the European vegetation, the Hellenic syntaxa checklist will be produced down to the syntaxonomic level of alliance to serve as a precursor of a full syntaxonomic checklist including all associations.