Annual reports
2026 Annual report
This report summarizes the activities of the European Vegetation Survey (EVS) Working Group from October 2025 to September 2026.
(1) EVS Conference “Celebrating the Legacy of Sandro Pignatti”. Professor Sandro Pignatti, founder of the European Vegetation Survey, died on 13 June 2025 at the age of 95. To honour his enormous contribution to the development of science and to international collaboration among vegetation scientists, the European Vegetation Survey Working Group organized a conference at the Orto Botanico in Rome, where Pignatti had his office and hosted many EVS conferences in the 1990s and 2000s. This conference, prepared by Fabio Attorre and Riccardo Guarino, was held on 21 October 2025. It was attended by approximately 60 participants from 10 countries. Eleven invited talks highlighted different aspects of Pignatti’s life and work, as well as the history of the European Vegetation Survey. At the end of the day, the participants planted a tree in the Orto Botanico in memory of Sandro Pignatti.
(2) 34th European Vegetation Survey Conference. The 34th Conference of the European Vegetation Survey took place in Clermont-Ferrand, France, on 7–13 September 2026. It was hosted by Gilles Thébaud, Camille Roux, and other colleagues from the Université Clermont Auvergne, as well as by the Société française de phytosociologie, represented by its President, Frédéric Bioret, and other members. The main conference topic was “Historical data, dynamics and conservation”. This topic was chosen to highlight the work of the pioneer phytosociologists Josias Braun-Blanquet and Aimé Luquet, carried out in the French Massif Central near Clermont-Ferrand and published a hundred years ago, in 1926. The conference was attended by 125 participants from 22 countries, who presented 54 talks and 35 posters. On the day of arrival, 7 September, Milan Chytrý and colleagues from Masaryk University, together with Salza Palpurina from GBIF, led the workshop “Open vegetation data and their processing in R”, which was attended by 23 participants from 11 countries. The mid-conference excursion on 9 September visited the Dore Mountains, including the loci classici of several syntaxa described by Aimé Luquet. An unforgettable experience was the conference dinner on the summit of the Puy de Dôme, a magnificent volcanic mountain (1465 m a.s.l.) with a panoramic view over the Auvergne landscape. The post-symposium excursion on 11–13 September visited the Cantal Mountains, where participants saw loci classici of syntaxa described by Braun-Blanquet, with Gilles Thébaud providing a detailed explanation of the flora, vegetation, and environment of the region.
(3) European Vegetation Archive (EVA). According to the EVA Annual Report, published in April 2026, EVA included data from 110 contributing databases with a total of 2,328,036 vegetation plots, 91% of which were georeferenced. Of these plots, 76% were under the semi-restricted regime, 17% under the restricted regime, and the remaining 7% were open access. The ResurveyEurope database included 529 individual datasets with 575,799 observations from 153,480 plots. EVA-MAP, a new interactive online database and map application with header data from EVA vegetation plots, was launched in 2025 and significantly improved in summer 2026. Since its start until April 2026, EVA data have been made available for 278 research projects. Between the two most recent EVA reports, EVA projects have produced 10 new journal publications.
(4) European Vegetation Classification Committee (EVCC). The EVCC was coordinated by Wolfgang Willner (AT, Secretary) and Idoia Biurrun (ES, Deputy Secretary). There was no online meeting in 2026 because no materials had been prepared for voting. Currently, two proposals are under consideration by a Specialist Group, and two are awaiting a direct vote by the EVCC members, which is scheduled for January 2027.
(5) Special issues. Several Special issues and Topical Collections have been published or are in preparation, based on materials presented at previous EVS conferences:
- “Celebrating the Legacy of Sandro Pignatti” in Annali di Botanica, a journal edited by Pignatti for many years. This special issue, edited by Fabio Attorre (IT) and Riccardo Guarino (IT), was based on the conference of the same title, held in Rome in October 2025. Published in September 2026, it included ten articles based on the invited talks from that conference.
- “Vegetation Survey and Restoration of Ecosystems” in Rendiconti Lincei, edited by Michele De Sanctis (IT), Fabio Attorre (IT), Rosario G. Gavilán (ES), Flavia Landucci (IT-CZ), Zygmunt Kącki (PL), Mária Šibíková (SK), and Giuliano Fanelli (IT), was completed with seven published articles.
- “Classification and Diversity of European Forests and Forest-fringes” in Vegetation Classification and Survey, based on the EVS Conference in Rome 2023 and edited by Idoia Biurrun (ES), Jorge Capelo (PT), Pavel Novák (CZ), Jozef Šibík (SK), and Wolfgang Willner (AT), was completed in 2025 with seven published articles.
- “Vegetation Classification of Islands and Archipelagos” in Vegetation Classification and Survey, based on the EVS Conference and the IAVS Symposium in Funchal 2024, edited by Erwin Bergmeier (ES), Jorge Capelo (PT), Jürgen Dengler (CH), Riccardo Guarino (IT), and Kyle Palmquist (US), has published seven articles, and five articles are in revision. Although this special issue is not specifically European, seven of twelve submitted manuscripts are from Europe.
- “Diversity, Dynamics, Conservation, and Restoration of European Vegetation” in Vegetation Ecology and Diversity, based on the EVS Conference in Perugia 2025 and edited by Corrado Marcenò (IT), Alicia Teresa Rosario Acosta (IT), Jorge Capelo (PT), Alessandro Silvestre Gristina (IT), Anna Kuzemko (UA), Salza Palpurina (BG), and Salvatore Pasta (IT), has become a permanent collection of articles.
- “Broad-scale Classification of European Vegetation” in Vegetation Classification and Survey, based on the EVS Conference in Perugia 2025 and edited by Idoia Biurrun (ES), Flavia Landucci (CZ), Pavel Novák (CZ), Tomáš Peterka (CZ), and Denys Vynokurov (DE/UA), is in progress.
(6) Social media. In September 2026, the “European Vegetation Survey” BlueSky account had 102 followers (+35 compared to the previous year), while the “EVS – European Vegetation Survey” Facebook group had 566 members (+29 compared to the previous year).
Milan Chytrý, Idoia Biurrun, Gianmaria Bonari, Jorge Capelo, Anna Kuzemko, and Joop Schaminée (EVS Steering Committee)