Rapid progress is being made in North American vegetation science through recent developments with the U.S. National Vegetation Classification. Central to these advances is sharing, archiving, and disseminating field vegetation plots, the fundamental data required for describing and understanding vegetation communities. VegBank is the vegetation plot database of the Ecological Society of America's Panel on Vegetation Classification. VegBank consists of three linked databases that contain (1) vegetation plot records, currently including >22,000 plot records from 34 states and provinces; (2) all vegetation types recognized in the U.S. National Vegetation Classification and other vegetation types submitted by users; and (3) all plant taxa recognized by ITIS/USDA as well as all other plant taxa recorded in plot records. As a public database of plot records VegBank must tackle complex issues such as (1) accurate and consistent documentation of plant taxa recorded at many different times following different taxonomic standards (2) complete and consistent reporting while protecting sensitive data such as rare taxon occurrences, and (3) protection of intellectual property while archiving and serving data used to support scientific decision.
Vegetation plot records, community types and plant taxa may be submitted to VegBank by the public. Plots may be marked with three different levels of sensitivity, which masks the true plot location to varying degrees, allowing general location to be known but protecting rare taxa. Users of the VegBank website may use VegBank's search engine to find and view plots, community taxa, or plant taxa of interest. Improvements and alternate opinions may be added by annotating plot records to a community type, or interpreting taxon occurrences. Users may also group plots and taxa into datasets of particular interest for download, mapping, and summary via constancy tables. Plots, taxa, and datasets may be directly cited. Differences in plant taxonomy over time and taxonomic standards are overcome by using taxonomic concepts, which are a combination of a plant name with a taxonomic reference defining or providing a context for that name. These concepts may be mapped to one another through set-theory relationships so that plots with different taxonomic standards can be directly compared. VegBank represents a permanent archive for plot data, allowing data to continue to inform ecological research well into the future.