In: Dengler, J., Oldeland, J., Jansen, F., Chytrý, M., Ewald, J., Finckh, M., Glöckler, F., Lopez-Gonzalez, G., Peet, R.K., Schaminée, J.H.J. (2012) [Eds.]: Vegetation databases for the 21st century. – Biodiversity & Ecology 4: 105–110. DOI: 10.7809/b-e.00065. 105 Long Database Report The West African Vegetation Database Marco Schmidt, Thomas Janßen, Stefan Dressler, Karen Hahn, Mipro Hien, Souleymane Konaté, Anne Mette Lykke, Ali Mahamane, Bienvenu Sambou, Brice Sinsin, Adjima Thiombiano, Rüdiger Wittig & Georg Zizka Abstract: The West African Vegetation Database (http://www.westafricanvegetation.org; GIVD ID AF-00-001) is an online database that has been designed to securely store, edit and manage phytosociological and dendrometrical relevés from West Africa to provide data for research projects dealing with, but not limited to, plant communities, biogeography, population structure, and vegetation dy- namics. An integrated access management system allows data owners to keep data private, to grant selected users access or to make data sets available to the general public. Data entry is possible online or in a local offline database that can be synchronized with the online database. The database allows the calculation of biodiversity indices and has several export options. Keywords: data management; dendrometry; dry forest; Guinea Zone; intellectual property right; phytosociology; Sahel Zone; sa- vanna; Sudan Zone; tree measurements; West Africa. Received: 17 December 2010 – Accepted: 26 May 2011 – Co-ordinating Editor: Jens Oldeland. Introduction West Africa covers an environmental gra- dient from the Sahara desert to the rain- forests of Upper Guinea via steppes and savannas of the Sahel (Plate A) and Sudan (Plate B). Mountain chains, inselbergs and gallery forests (Plate C) interrupt the zonal patterns of vegetation. It is a region of rapid environmental change due to a growing population, over-exploitation, changing land use practices and climate change. These changes will have an im- pact on plant communities and species and consequently on people’s livelihood and well-being, all the more in an area where wild plants are of high economic and cultural importance. To be able to conserve plant diversity and ecosystem goods and services, it is mandatory to have a good understanding and documen- tation of it. On the global level, this has been expressed by the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation (Secretariat of the CBD 2002), which explicitly includes the objective to “develop an integrated, dis- tributed interactive information system to manage and make accessible information on plant diversity”. While more and more collection data for the region has become available via GBIF, especially from the herbaria of Aarhus (AAU), Frankfurt (FR), Paris (P) and Wageningen (WAG), the availability of vegetation data was very much limited up to now and often restricted to thesis papers that are not widely distributed. These data are rarely archived in digital form at the institutional level and therefore are frequently forgot- ten or lost when projects end or research- ers leave science. To overcome this situa- tion, we decided to develop an online platform for West African vegetation data, the West African Vegetation Data- base, in a collaborative effort of African and European partners involved in the BIOTA (http://www.biota-africa.org) and SUN (http://www.sunproject.dk) projects. The database is continuously updated and developed under UNDESERT (http:// www.undesert.neri.dk). Two workshops on biodiversity data have been held in November 2007 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, and in June 2008 in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso for capacity building on general concepts of biodiversity data, relational databases and collection management with partners of all involved institutions. During these workshops, the needs for an online data- base on West African vegetation data have been discussed, and a strategy for data entry and implementation of the da- tabase has been developed. These work- shops have been important not only for establishing a good cooperation between the partners, but also resulted in at least two important structural components of the database: (1) a data access rights man- agement scheme to considerably increase acceptance of the database among local researchers (for a more thorough treat- ment of this aspect, see Janßen et al. 2011) and (2) a local offline database tool including a synchronisation feature with the online database and designed to cope with the frequently slow and unreliable West African internet connections. Structure The West African Vegetation Database is an online database running on a central Microsoft SQL Server installation. Its data contents can be synchronized with and exported to the offline database VegDa 3.0 running on MS Access 2000. The data structure builds on the structure developed for VegDa (Schmidt 2006), a local vegetation database that originated in the BIOTA project and had two main purposes: (1) storing the data of the West African transect of BIOTA observatories (for the concept of these observatories, see Schmiedel & Jürgens 2005, Jürgens et al. 2012) and other project-related vegeta- tion data and (2) collecting published data from the collaborating institutions in or-