The Romanian Grassland Database (RGD): historical background, current status and future perspectives

This report describes the Romanian Grassland Database (RGD), registered under EU-RO-008 in the Global Index of Vegetation-Plot Databases (GIVD). This collaborative initiative aims at collecting all available vegetation-plot data (relevés) of grasslands and other open habitats from the territory of Romania and providing them for science, nationally and internationally, e.g. via the European Vegetation Archive (EVA) and the global database “sPlot”. It mainly contains data from wet, mesic, dry, saline, alpine and rocky grasslands, but also some other vegetation types like heathlands, mires, ruderal, segetal, aquatic and cryptogam-dominated vegetation. The currently 21,685 relevés have mainly been digitised from literature sources (90%), while the rest comes from individual unpublished sources (10%). We report on the background and history of RGD, explain its “Data Property and Governance Rules” under which data are contributed and retrieved and outline how RGD can contribute to research in the fields of vegetation ecology, macroecology and conservation