Annual reports
2013 Annual report
The 22nd annual meeting of European Vegetation Survey (EVS) took place in Rome on 8–11 April 2013. It was organized by the Italian Society for Vegetation Science, University of Rome La Sapienza and University of Perugia, with Roberto Venanzoni as the chair of the Local Organizing Committee, which included Emiliano Agrillo, Fabio Attorre, Carlo Blasi, Daniela Gigante, Flavia Landucci, Sandro Pignatti and Francesco Spada. The main topics were “Coastal and Inland Saline Vegetation“ (sessions convened by Erwin Bergmeier and Joop Schaminée) and “Red List Evaluation of Plant Communities“ (sessions convened by John Janssen and John Rodwell). The sessions were held in the Accademia dei Lincei hall in Palazzo Corsini and poster presentations in Orto Botanico. 178 participants from 16 countries of Europe and beyond saw an interesting programme with 40 talks and 86 posters. Two days of scientific sessions (9 and 10 April) were followed by one-day excursion to the Circeo National Park at the sea coast south of Rome. The excursion was organized jointly with FIP (Fédération internationale de phytosociologie) and it was followed on 11 April by sessions of the 2nd FIP International Conference. This arrangement facilitated establishment of new contacts between the members of EVS and FIP.
There were several noticeable activities of EVS between the annual meetings in Vienna (May 2012) and Rome (April 2013):
(1) With the financial support from IAVS, EVS website (www.euroveg.org) was developed and launched on 24 November 2012. In association with the website development, the traditional EVS logo with an Allium plant was slightly reshaped and graphically enhanced.
(2) After more than ten years of joint work of a team of 30 experts from 15 countries, led by Ladislav Mucina, the European Vegetation Checklist of phytosociological classes, orders and alliances was completed and submitted for publication in March 2013. This checklist is intended to become a standard international reference for vegetation classification in Europe.
(3) A team led by Joop Schaminée developed a crosswalk between the EUNIS Habitat Classification (up to Level 3), used by the European Environment Agency (EEA), and vegetation units used in the preliminary version of the European Vegetation Checklist. This crosswalk is a major contribution to the awareness and application of vegetation science in European policy making and nature conservation. An EVS team is now working on a further contract for the EEA to revise the EUNIS forest habitat classification.
(4) Several new international projects of vegetation survey started, most notably The Braun-Blanquet project, coordinated by Borja Jiménez-Alfaro and Milan Chytrý, aiming at collecting vegetation-plot data for all European vegetation alliances and using this data set for parameterization (characterization) of vegetation units. Another pan-European project of vegetation survey, WetVegEurope, aiming at classification of European freshwater aquatic and wetland vegetation to the level of association, was started by Flavia Landucci, Kateřina Šumberová and Milan Chytrý. Both of these projects, and also others, received extensive support from many vegetation scientists from different European countries, which made it possible to assemble very large international data sets of vegetation plots.
(5) Working with a UK marine biologist and with the participation of EVS members, John Rodwell and John Janssen completed a feasibility study for Red Listing of European Habitats for European Comission DG (Environment). At the Rome meeting they announced the possibility of a major EVS contribution to an upcoming DG (Environment) project to implement this methodology across the wider Europe.
(6) Preparation of the Virtual Special Feature “Towards consistent classification of European grasslands” in the journal Applied Vegetation Science continued as a joint initiative of EVS and the IAVS European Dry Grassland Group, with Jürgen Dengler as the senior guest editor. The first paper of this Virtual Special Feature, prepared by Pavol Eliáš Jr and colleagues, devoted to central and south-east Europan dry grasslands, was published in 2013.
(7) A proposal of a large interdisciplinary project that would support major activities of EVS was prepared by an international team led by Alessandro Chiarucci, under the title „European Vegetation Information System“. This proposal was submitted to the 7th Framework Programme of European Union in October 2012, but it was not selected for support.
(8) A text on the history of European Vegetation Survey since 1991 was written by John Rodwell and published on the EVS website in April 2013.
(9) An amendment of the EVS Bylaws was adopted by the EVS Business Meeting in Rome in April 2013 and approved by the IAVS Council in Tartu in June 2013. The aim of this amendment was to guarantee that at least one colleague from each of the three main European regions (Western-Central and North-western Europe, Southern Europe and Eastern-Central and Eastern Europe) is represented in the EVS Steering Committee.
Milan Chytrý