UKCEH has brought together a diverse range of high-quality vegetation plot datasets to form a new National Vegetation Plot Database for Great Britain – the GBNVPD. Zeke Marshall tells us more...
Great Britain has a long history of vegetation survey and science. But since the completion of the National Vegetation Classification project, the closure of the Unit of Vegetation Science at Lancaster University, and retirement of its lead John Rodwell in 2004, there has been no central coordination for collecting, standardising, storing or sharing vegetation plot data at the national scale.
This contrasts with the rest of Europe which maintains a strong tradition of vegetation science, organised through the European Vegetation Survey working group of the International Association for Vegetation Science.
Now, following extensive data rescue and vegetation monitoring at UKCEH and in partnership with a large number of collaborators, including the Joint Nature Conservation Committee, Natural England, Natural Resources Wales, NatureScot, the James Hutton Institute, the Floodplain Meadows Partnership, and the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland, UKCEH has brought together, for the first time, a diverse range of high-quality vegetation plot datasets to form a new National Vegetation Plot Database for Great Britain – the GBNVPD.
The GBNVPD now acts as the centralised repository for vegetation plot data from Great Britain, the Isle of Man, the Bailiwick of Guernsey, and Bailiwick of Jersey and is registered in the global index of vegetation-plot databases. The database has been submitted to both the European Vegetation Archive and ReSurveyEurope.
Version 1.0 of the GBNVPD contains 277,070 samples from 200,733 plots (208,399 plots when including all nests), from 63 constituent datasets, surveyed between 1949 and 2024 with a total of 4,463,300 occurrences of 4,086 accepted taxa (3,464 accepted taxa at the species aggregate rank and below). The GBNVPD will be maintained and expanded continuously through the continued rescue of historic datasets and integration of future survey data, and we welcome submissions.
These data are vital for the maintenance of vegetation classification systems, improving our understanding of both plant community ecology and the ecology of individual species, detecting environmental change, and ecological forecasting.
Thanks to all the collaborators who have helped bring the GBNVPD to this stage, recognising the need for an actively managed centralised national vegetation plot database.
Please contact Zeke Marshall for details on how to access and submit data to the GBNVPD.
The initiative was supported in part by our National Capability UK programme that aims to make data available to, and in collaboration with, the wider UK and international community
For further information please see the UKCEH website and our article in Vegetation Classification and Survey:
Marshall, Z, Wood, C, Mountford, E, Rodwell, J, Strachan, I, Pescott, O, Tatarenko, I, Hodgson, J, Walker, K, Latham, J, Maskell, L, Britton, A J, Pakeman, R J, Dargie, ., Mitchell, R, Jones, L, Hester, A, Ross, L, Dalrymple, S, Stevens, C, Rowe, E, McCullagh, F, Willis, S, Marrs, R, Norton, L, Smart, S M, 2025. A National Vegetation Plot Database for Great Britain. Vegetation Classification and Survey 6, 181–190. https://doi.org/10.3897/VCS.160378.
