Federal Agency for Nature Conservation, Dept. Plant conservation, Konstantinstr. 100, 53179 Bonn, Germany
FloraWeb (www.floraweb.de) is the national node to information on wild growing plants and vegetation types in Germany. In our database we keep about 15 Mio records of plant recordings from floristic surveys of the past 50 years. For the public these records are displayed in distribution maps with information on presence/absence in grid cells of 6x10’’, which is one unit of the topographical map in the scale 1:25.000. Additional species level information about taxonomy, threats, conservation, distribution areas, habitats, ecological and biological traits and uses make up web pages with fact sheets dynamically created from the database tables using xml/xsl techniques. A database of vegetation plot data that we call VegetWeb is currently being built, using the developing new standard ESVeg (Exchange Standard for Vegetation plot data, in cooperation with Vegbank, U.S. and TurboVeg, Netherlands) for data import from different data sources.
Since FloraWeb is fed with data from many different sources we had very early recognized the need to handle different taxonomic concepts and to relate and transmit data linked to these concepts. For this we funded the MORETAX-Project (www.bgbm.fu-berlin.de/BioDivInf/Projects/ MoreTax/) at the BGBM Berlin, where a transmission engine for transferring data from non-congruent taxonomic concepts based on the Berlin Model has been designed.
Since 2004 FloraWeb is a GBIF data provider, using the ABCD-Schema and the BioCASe protocol. With about 4 million records of grid-data from the floristic survey in three time slices it ranks within the top 5 of GBIF data providers. We look forward to provide a wider spectrum of our species level facts data and the information about the underlying taxonomic concepts using the evolving TDWG standards “TCS” (Taxonomic Concept Exchange Standard) and “SDD” (Structured Descriptive Data).