The history of European vegetation databases: from relevé notebooks to a continental research infrastructure

Abstract

Europe holds the world’s richest legacy of vegetation‑plot data thanks to more than a century of phytosociological sampling. The past three decades transformed scattered, paper‑based records from vegetation plots into interoperable, queryable databases, culminating in the European Vegetation Archive (EVA), a governed infrastructure that integrates national, regional, and thematic databases and enables continent syntheses. This historical overview traces the development from early relevé traditions to the present. The main periods include the first experimentations with information technologies in the 1960s–1980s, the digitization wave supported by the IAVS Working Group European Vegetation Survey in the 1990s, the applications of vegetation-plot databases beyond vegetation classification in the 2000s, the consolidation achieved by the establishment of EVA in the 2010s, and the emergence of new databases, FloraVeg.EU and ReSurveyEurope, alongside the gradual transition towards open science in the 2020s.