ReSurveyEurope
ReSurveyEurope is an initiative within European Vegetation Archive (EVA) that aims at mobilizing vegetation-plot resurvey data with repeated measurements over time and establishing a collaborative initiative as a basis for nuanced and robust assessment of biodiversity trends on small spatial grains over longer periods in Europe. Our initiative aims at inclusion of time series with repeated sampling of the same plot in EVA or identifying such samples in the existing EVA databases if they are already included. It also supports a parallel initiative within the global vegetation database sPlot (starting with its next version 4.0). While the ReSurveyEurope within EVA focuses on Europe, sPlot will collect such time series outside Europe and seek the consent of the EVA contributors to combine the data at the global scale, following the sPlot rules.
ReSurveyEurope call for data contribution and collaboration [PDF]
ReSurveyEurope Data Property and Governance Rules [PDF]
The ReSurveyEurope initiave has been proposed:
- To establish a network of scientists that collaborate in collecting and analyzing fine-scale plant community resurvey data (relevés, plots) from Europe. The approach shall be inclusive and transparent, and thus ReSurveyEurope will be modelled according to the rules of the European Vegetation Archive (EVA).
- The focus of ReSurveyEurope will be put on regions, habitat types and ecosystems that are less covered by other initiatives, in particular open habitats such as grasslands, fields and wetlands, especially in lowlands and at mid-elevations. However, in principle, ReSurveyEurope will be collecting data from all ecosystems all over Europe.
Contact – conceptual issues
- Franz Essl, University of Vienna, Austria, franz.essl@univie.ac.at
- Milan Chytrý, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic, chytry@sci.muni.cz
- Helge Bruelheide, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg and German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig, Germany, helge.bruelheide@botanik.uni-halle.de
Contact – data management issues
- Ilona Knollová, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic, ikuzel@sci.muni.cz
Collaboration, governance and decision making
Such a collaborative initiative depends on the willingness of many actors to collaborate, and thus transparent governance and decision-making structures are essential. ReSurveyEurope thus follows an inclusive approach in terms of open collaboration and co-authorship policy, which builds on the experiences and approach of EVA. This implies that i) data owners/contributors have control about the use of their data in any specific analysis (allowing to opt-in for the resulting papers according to specific criteria such as the numbers of plots used in the analysis), and that ii) colleagues not directly involved in ReSurveyEurope can submit proposals for analyses which will be subject to approval. The principles of collaboration, governance and decision making are described in ReSurveyEurope Data Property and Governance Rules.
Data for ReSurveyEurope
The following data are suitable for ReSurveyEurope: fine-grain biodiversity data (e.g. relevés, plots, transects) that have sampled the presence (and ideally also abundance) of vascular plants with at least two repeated sampling events in different years done with identical or at least similar and comparable methods. This data call includes both the terrestrial and aquatic environments. The geographic scope is Europe.
- Data sets should contain as a minimum requirement:
- a full compilation of vascular plant occurrences (presences/absences), preferably also information on abundance or proxies for abundance such as cover or biomass
- plots’ latitude and longitude and information on the precision of the coordinates
- sampling date (ideally the precise date, minimum the year)
- plot size
Further, information on the method of data collection, vegetation cover, elevation, inclination, orientation, bedrock substrate, land use, recent land-use change and vegetation or habitat type would be most helpful.
Data provision format
The format of data provision should be ideally in Turboveg 2, in which the following header-data fields are added and filled in. Using Turboveg v. 2.148 or higher versions, a database structure with these fields can be downloaded from https://www.synbiosys.alterra.nl/turboveg/ under Database dictionaries / ReSurvey)
If the resurveyed plots are contained in an existing EVA database, indicate them in ReSurvey header data fields, and send the updated version of the database to EVA to Ilona Knollová.
If you have or obtain data from resurveyed plots that are not stored in any EVA database, you can either store them in an existing EVA database or send them separately to Ilona Knollová. If they are not included in any existing EVA database, we will store them in the new specialized EVA database called ReSurveyEurope. If you have many records from resurveyed plots (several hundreds or thousands), you can register them as a new EVA database. In such a case, please register this database also in the Global Index of Vegetation-plot Databases (GIVD; https://www.givd.info).
If your data are not in Turboveg or you do not use this program, please send it to us in any format. We will transform them into the Turboveg format.
Metadata
Each resurvey dataset should come with a brief metadata sheet. If one database contains data from several resurvey projects, each of them should be accompanied by a metadata sheet. Please use the downloadable metadata sheet provided at http://euroveg.org/download/ReSurveyEurope-Project-Metadata-Form.docx
Time line
We plan to write a short overview paper introducing ReSurveyEurope, its current status and future opportunities for a scientific journal (in 2022). This paper will present the idea, status quo and outline next steps. All data contributors will be invited for co-authorship.
After this paper is published, ReSurveyEurope will be used for various analyses, for which data contributors can opt-in as active co-authors.
For any queries, pls send e-mails to the contact persons.
Cooperation
- forestREplot - a database of forest herb layer resurvey plots - https://forestreplot.ugent.be/
- Gloria Network – Global Observation Research Initiative in Alpine Environments – https://gloria.ac.at/home
- LOTVS Database – Long-term Vegetation Sampling – https://lotvs.csic.es/
- Nutrient Status Initiative - https://vegsciblog.org/2021/03/01/invitation-for-joint-research-in-herbaceous-vegetation/, a joint data call of ReSurvey Europe and the Nutrient Status Initiative (May 2021) [PDF]