The South African National Vegetation Database: History, development, applications, problems and future

Abstract

Southern Africa has been recognised as one of the most interesting and important areas of the world from an ecological and evolutionary point of view. The establishment and development of the National Vegetation Database (NVD) of South Africa enabled South Africa to contribute to environmental planning and conservation management in this floristically unique region. In this paper, we aim to provide an update on the development of the NVD since it was last described, near its inception, more than a decade ago. The NVD was developed using the Turboveg software environment, and currently comprises 46 697 vegetation plots (relevés) sharing 11 690 plant taxa and containing 968 943 species occurrence records. The NVD was primarily founded to serve vegetation classification and mapping goals but soon became recognised as an important tool in conservation assessment and target setting. The NVD has directly helped produce the National Vegetation Map, National Forest Type Classification, South African National Biodiversity Assessment and Forest Type Conservation Assessment. With further development of the NVD and more consistent handling of the legacy data (old data sets), the current limitations regarding certain types of application of the data should be significantly reduced. However, the use of the current NVD in multidisciplinary research has certainly not been fully explored. With the availability of new pools of well-trained vegetation surveyors, the NVD will continue to be purpose driven and serve the needs of biological survey in pursuit of sustainable use of the vegetation and flora resources of the southern African subcontinent.

Comment on “Burrough, S.E., Breman, E., and Dodd, C., 2012. Can phytoliths provide an insight into past vegetation of the Middle Kalahari paleolakes during the late Quaternary? Journal of Arid Environments 82, 156–164”

“…The shaded area indicates those regions where the mean temperature of the wet season is below 22 C (data from Hijmans et al, 2005), the cross-over threshold for C 3 grasses. The distribution of recorded Pooideae grasses is shown Rutherford et al, 2012;SANBI, 2003), and adheres well to the predicted range of C 3 grasses.…”

“…Burrough et al claim to have found significant percentages (35-85% of the short-cell sum) of Pooideae phytoliths in their samples, including samples dating to the late Holocene (1.4 AE 0.2 ka). There are, however, no Pooideae grasses in Botswana (Field, 1976;Kabelo and Mafokate, 2004;Rutherford et al, 2003Rutherford et al, , 2012SANBI, 2003) (Fig. 1).…”

“…Considering observations of Chloridoideae (n ¼ 79,767) and Panicoideae (n ¼ 33,748) grasses from a number of databases held by the South African National Biodiversity Institute (http://sibis.sanbi.org/faces/DataSources. jsp; Rutherford et al, 2012Rutherford et al, , 2003SANBI, 2003), it is apparent, despite inevitable regional sampling biases, that there is no significant difference in the distribution of the subfamilies. We have analysed the subfamily distributions in terms of the climatic variables that best determine 'mesic' vs. 'xeric' conditions (mean annual precipitation, potential evapotranspiration and mean precipitation of the driest quarter; the latter of which is the primary climatic determinant of the subfamilies' distributions according to maximum entropy analyses (Phillips et al, 2006)).…”

50,000 years of vegetation and climate change in the southern Namib Desert, Pella, South Africa

“…Modern plant distributions, obtained from the South African National Botanical Institute (Rutherford et al, 2012;Rutherford et al, 2003;SANBI, 2003), are correlated with AI (Trabucco and Zomer, 2009) and MAT (Hijmans et al, 2005) data to define climatic envelopes for plant species and fit species pdfs (pdf sp ).…”

“…It must be kept in mind, however, that these taxa are not restricted to the Fynbos Biome. Rather, particularly in the case of Artemisia and Stoebe-type (Stoebe and Elytropappus rhinocerotis) (Urrego et al, 2015), these plants occur across southern Africa where there is enough moisture to meet their requirements, and temperatures during the wet season are below 21°C (Rutherford et al, 2012;Rutherford et al, 2003;SANBI, 2003;Urrego et al, 2015). A temperature depression of 4 -6°C during the last glacial period, as estimated from regional palaeotemperature records (Chevalier and…”