Preface

The motivation to build a completely new tool for managing vegetation plot data, to be more precise, phytosociological data, was the need to set up a European vegetation data archive in which very heterogeneous data sources could be brought together. Although the idea already existed for quite a few years, it was Milan Chytrý from Brno University in the Czech Republic who motivated me to start the work. The first task was to set up a proper database model that could well cover the many different Turboveg2 databases available in the international community. It had to deal with many different taxonomies and many different so-called pop-up lists (lookup tables). After setting up and testing the model, the actual writing of the software could get started. It still took quite some years before Turboveg3 could be distributed to the wider community. At first, only a small group of users applied the Turboveg3 program to manage some of the big databases, and especially Ilona Knollová from the Masaryk University (Brno, Czech Republic), who is the main manager of the European Vegetation Archive, helped a great deal to improve the software, by pointing out the bugs and by giving many suggestions for extending the functionality of Turboveg3.

Not only the software was fruitful for building up the European Vegetation Archive, also the software became very important for managing the Dutch National Vegetation Database, especially in relation to the reporting under Article 17 of the Habitats Directive. The Dutch database is used to map the distribution of the Annex I habitats and therefore requires a quality standard. It was clear that the required level of quality could not be obtained by continuing using the Turboveg2 software and related databases, especially because it lacks a well-documented database model.

Stephan Hennekens,

Wageningen, Juli 2023