Improvements and open issues of the database VegItaly. What are the perspectives?

The database VegItaly (http://www.vegitaly.it; GIVD ID EU-IT-001) is a collaborative project supported by the Italian scientific community. Nevertheless it was ideated about ten years ago, has developed especially during the last few years thank to the cooperation of a large group of scientists. An overview of the content of the database, technical improvements and open issues will be showed. At present an amount of 31,100 vegetation plots, including published and unpublished data are stored in the database. Some basic statistics will be analysed; for example, data distribution in space and time and represented vegetation types. Issues related to data import from different formats have been solved by developing user-friendly tools: archiver, VegImport and TabImport. Some minimum standards have been adopted to ensure to the users a good quality and an easier handling of the data. Main advantages of VegItaly and examples of firsts applications will be also showed. VegItaly represents a milestone in the Italian vegetation science and much progress has been made, but the results obtained are still far to be considered satisfactory for a country so rich in biodiversity as Italy is. What are the perspectives for the future? We will expect that more and more researchers take part into the project, not only providing relevés but also contributing to data storage and, hopefully, fundraising. Moreover new technical improvements have been already ideated to facilitate the data management and exchange/integration with other national and European initiatives.