An information infrastructure for vegetation science (Hosted by NCEAS)

Vegetation classification is of central importance to biological conservation for plannning and inventory, to resource management for monitoring and planning, and to basic scientific research as a tool for organizing and interpreting ecological information. All of these activities require that ecological units be defined and that their distribution on the landscape be known and understood. Vegetation classification contributes significantly to analysis of ecological problems that vary in scale from persisitence of tiny populations of endangered species to global projections of the impact of climate change. Technological advances have made practical large-scale analyses that cross agency jurisdictions or geographic regions and address applied ecological issues as diverse as global change, ecosystem management, and conservation planning. However, all such efforts depend on having available a common set of well defined and broadly accepted classification units.

Through the combined efforts of The Nature Conservancy (TNC), the Ecological Society of America Vegetation Panel (ESA-VP), and the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC), the United States is on the verge of having its first fully functional, widely-applied vegetation classification system. The federal government has declared the need for a single standard, and on October 22, 1997, the Secretary of Interior, acting as Chair of the Federal Geographic Data Committee, approved the Vegetation Information and Classification Standard (http://biology.usgs.gov/fgdc.veg) which is now the standard vegetation classification for U.S. Federal agencies and their cooperators. Yet, there are still major obstacles ot overcome to make such a system operational and broadly accepted. ESA-VP is working in close collaboration with TNC and FGDC to draft standards for field data acquisition, type, definition, and peer review of proposed additions and changes. A fourth component, an information infrastructure to manage the anticipated 107 plots and 104 plant associations required for a national system, and to distribute this information across the web in a continually revised but perfectly archived format, represents a major intellectual and practical obstacle to the realization of the system. It is this final piece that our proposal addresses.

We propose to convene at NCEAS a working group to design, construct and test prototypes of two core components of the information infrastructure necessary to support the U.S. National Vegetation Classification (US-NVC): a stand-alone vegetation plots database system with internet access tools, and an addition to the TNC Heritage Data Management System that will allow the national classification database to be both continually revised and perfectly archived. Subsets of this working group would meet at intervals over a 2-yr period to develop and test components of the system. A postdoctoral associate employed by NCEAS would work in consultation with project coordinators, TNC and federal government analysts, and NCEAS staff to complete most of the actual design and programming. The prototypes would be demonstrated using a variety of data from the greater Yosemite vegetation mapping project. Subsequently, additional datasets would be used to explore and demonstrate the robustness of the system. Once developed and peer reviewed, the modules of the working prototype would be adopted and maintained, by some combination of TNC, USGS (NBII), FGDC and ESA.