| Summary: |
External
24-26 Feb 2010 |
| Venue: |
Hamburg, Germany |
| Description: |
The German Working Group on Vegetation Databases is dedicated to the promotion of plot databanks, in order to facilitate application of botanical data, to open up new paths of analysis and to encourage exchange among scientists and practitioners. As a Section of the Network for Phytodiversity (NetPhyD), we coordinate activities concerning the stimulation, compilation, dissemination and utilisation of vegetation data in Germany and surrounding countries. Since 2002 the Working Group has organized eight annual meetings.
The forthcoming 9th meeting in Hamburg will be focussed on vegetation databases and climate change. Vegetation databanks are an indispensable tool in climate change research that deserves more attention by scientists and decision makers. Their vast legacy of historical and recent co-ocurrence data allow to study vegetation responses to climate at various scales and levels of complexity.
We particularly invite contributions based on vegetation databanks and related archives on the following topics:
- detection of climate-induced changes in community composition and functional traits
- modelling of species niches
- modelling of current and future distributions of species and vegetation types
- separating long-term trends in vegetation composition from methodological artifacts caused by subjective sampling, unequal plot sizes, incomplete relevés etc.
- disentangling effects of climate change, land use change, eutrophication, and biotic invasions
- forecasting landscape change
estimating vulnerability of species and vegetation types
- dealing with scenarios, uncertainty and risk
.
Both case studies and methodological contributions are welcome.
While databases and climate changes are the major topic of the meeting, as always, we also invite the submission of contributions associated with the general aims of the working group, such as the presentation of new methods, new software tools, or new databases. In particular, we invite all persons who host a vegetation database to present its scope and content on a poster. We intend to publish a comprehensive overview of vegetation databases worldwide in the conference volume.
For more information, please see the website (link below). |
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