Ecological Indicator Values of Europe (EIVE) 1.0: a powerful open-access tool for vegetation scientists

Background: Ecological indicator values (EIVs) have a long tradition in vegetation ecological research in Europe. EIVs characterise the ecological optimum of species along major environmental gradients using ordinal scales. Calculating mean indicator values per plot is an effective way of bioindication. Following first systems in Russia and Central Europe, about two dozen EIV systems have been published for various parts of Europe. Aims: As there was no EIV system available at European scale that could be used for broad-scale analyses, e.g. in the context of the European Vegetation Archive (EVA), we develop such a system for the first time for the vascular plants of Europe. Location: Europe. Methods: We compiled all national and major regional EIV systems and harmonized their plant nomenclature with a newly developed contemporary European taxonomic backbone (EuroSL 1.0). Using regression, we rescaled the individual EIV systems for the main parameters to continent-wide quasi-metric scales, ranging from 1 to 99. The data from each individual system were then translated into a probability curve approximated with a normal distribution, weighed with the logarithm of the area represented and summed up across the systems. From the European density curve we extracted then a mean and a variance, which characterise the distribution of this species along this particular ecological gradient. Results and conclusions: Our consensus approach of integrating the expert knowledge of all existing EIV systems allowed deriving the first consistent description of the ecological behaviour for a significant part of the European vascular flora. The resulting Ecological Indicator Values of Europe (EIVE) 1.0 will be published open access to allow bioindication beyond country borders. Future releases of EIVE might contain more parameters, non-vascular plants and regionalisation or could be re-adjusted and extended to hitherto non-covered species through co-occurrence data from EVA

European Vegetation Archive (EVA): an integrated database of European vegetation plots

The European Vegetation Archive (EVA) is a centralized database of European vegetation plots developed by the IAVS Working Group European Vegetation Survey. It has been in development since 2012 and first made available for use in research projects in 2014. It stores copies of national and regional vegetation- plot databases on a single software platform. Data storage in EVA does not affect on-going independent development of the contributing databases, which remain the property of the data contributors. EVA uses a prototype of the data- base management software TURBOVEG 3 developed for joint management of multiple databases that use different species lists. This is facilitated by the Syn- BioSys Taxon Database, a system of taxon names and concepts used in the indi- vidual European databases and their corresponding names on a unified list of European flora. TURBOVEG 3 also includes procedures for handling data requests, selections and provisions according to the approved EVA Data Property and Governance Rules. By 30 June 2015, 61 databases from all European regions have joined EVA, contributing in total 1 027 376 vegetation plots, 82% of them with geographic coordinates, from 57 countries. EVA provides a unique data source for large-scale analyses of European vegetation diversity both for fundamental research and nature conservation applications. Updated informa- tion on EVA is available online at http://euroveg.org/eva-database