Two years after its official start, the national vegetation database VegItaly, a collaborative project supported by the Italian scientific community and developed by a large group of scientists, is presented. This article offers a concise overview of the content of the database, currently consisting of 31,100 vegetation plot, including published and unpublished data. Some basic statistics are analysed; for example, data distribution in space and time, represented vegetation types expressed as physiognomic categories. Although rather young and still in progress, VegItaly already contains data from all the Italian regions and stands as an optimal candidate for the development of an Italian national vegetation database. Its main goals,theoretical basis, technical features, functionalities and recent progresses are outlined, showing glimpses of future prospects

According to projects and practices that the Italian botanists and ecologists are carrying out for bringing "more nature in the city", new insights for a factual integration between ecological perspectives and more consolidated aesthetic and agronomic approaches to the sustainable planning and management of urban green areas are provided.Keywords Ecosystem services, Human well-being, Green infrastructure, Urban green areas, Urban biodiversity.

In recent years, interest in availability of georeferenced vegetation plots has stimulated or reinvigorated national initiatives to compile these data. In Italy, eleven vegetation databases are currently registered in the Global Index of Vegetation-Plot Databases (GIVD). In this paper we describe the Vegetation Plot Database-Sapienza University of Rome (VPD-Sapienza; GIVD code EU-IT-011), which started in 2012 and rapidly became one of the most prominent ones with a total of 21,917 georeferenced vegetation plots spanning across the country. These plots include 286,650 vascular plant species occurrences. Most of the plots belong to temperate deciduous forests (Querco roboris-Fagetea sylvaticae) and broadleaved evergreen forests (Quercetea ilicis), which together account for about 40% of the database. The need for the establishment of a national federated database integrating other national, regional, local and thematic databases is discussed in order to avoid setbacks such as duplication of data, taxonomic and syntaxonomic inconsistencies, and reduced efficiencies in collaborative projects, both at national and international levels.

Understanding and explaining the use of green spaces and forests is challenging for sustainable urban planning. In recent years there has been increasing demand for novel approaches to investigate urban green infrastructure by capitalizing on large databases from existing citizen science tools. In this study, we analyzed iNaturalist data to perform an assessment of the intentional use of these urban spaces for their value and to understand the main drivers. We retrieved the total number of observations obtained across a set of 672 European cities and focused on reporting from mapped green areas and forests. We used two separate multivariate explanatory models to investigate which factors explained variations in the number of observations for green areas and forests. We found a relatively heterogeneous use of these two urban green spaces. Gross domestic product was important in explaining the number of visits. Availability and accessibility also had positive relationships with the use of green areas and forests in cities, respectively. This study paves the way for better integration of citizen science data in assessing cultural services provided by urban green infrastructure and therefore in supporting the evaluation of spatial planning policies for the sustainable development of urban areas.