Vegetation database of the Working Group on Dry Grasslands in the Nordic and Baltic Region

This paper describes the structure and content of the vegetation database of the Working Group on Dry Grasslands in the Nordic and Baltic Region (code EU-00-001 of the World Metadatabase on Vegetation Databases). The Working Group on Dry Grasslands in the Nordic and Baltic Region has been founded in 2005 and is now a subgroup of the European Dry Grassland Group (EDGG). It aims at collecting all available phytosociological releves of dry grasslands and related communities (basically the phytosociological classes Festuco-Brometea, Koelerio-Corynephoretea, and Trifolio-Geranietea sanguinei) from the study region (Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, NW Russia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, N Poland, and NE Germany). Presently, 7,675 of an estimated total of 20,000 releves are available in the database, which is run offline with the program SORT 4.0. The data are mainly used by the members of the Working Group for large-scale consistent classifications, but external proposals for joint analyses are welcome.