Reconstructing ‘‘Plant Community Scenarios’’ by means of palaeocarpological data from the CENOFITA database, with an example from the Ca’ Viettone site (Pliocene, Northern Italy) Edoardo Martinetto, Elena Vassio * Dipartimento di Scienze della Terra, Universita ` degli Studi di Torino, via Valperga Caluso 35, I-10125 Torino, Italy article info Article history: Available online 11 September 2009 abstract CENOFITA 1.2 is a database containing published and unpublished information about 70 late Cenozoic Italian sites with plant macrofossils (taxonomy, stratigraphy, geography, qualitative and quantitative carpological data, plant ecology and habitus, literature citations). It provides a supporting tool for an easy retrieval of palaeofloristic data, also accessible to non-specialist users, which are useful to study Italian phytodiversity of the last 6 Myr and to contribute in reconstructing palaeovegetation and palae- oenvironment. As an example, this paper presents a first attempt towards the definition of a standard- ized reconstruction of selected aspects of late Cenozoic plant communities on the basis of data (mainly concerning fruits and seeds) extracted from CENOFITA 1.2, which regard the Pliocene Ca’ Viettone site. We obtained five alternative ‘‘Plant Community Scenarios’’ (PCSs), each one containing fifty sketchy ‘‘plant symbols,’’ which represent several categories of ‘‘growth forms’’ (e.g.: evergreen tree, deciduous shrub, etc.). The number of ‘‘plant symbols’’ of each type in a PCS has been determined on the basis of percent abundance (X), in sediment samples, of plant macrofossils referred to a definite category of ‘‘growth form.’’ We also introduced tentative corrections for taphonomical biases induced by different size and production rate of plant parts. Thanks to data integration from a wide sedimentation area, PCSs based on several, roughly contemporaneous, plant assemblages have been considered definitely more accurate representations of the ancient mesic plant communities than those based on a single plant assemblage. This type of PCS suggests, in agreement with former reconstructions, that the generalized mesic plant community of the Ca’ Viettone site would be a forest vegetation, highly diverse, and dominated by evergreen angiosperms and conifers. Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd and INQUA. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Databases are nowadays more and more numerous and employed in showing and sharing the extensive amount of data produced in various research fields. Much information, useful for comparative studies and further analyses, is not directly available from papers, but can be retrieved from databases. Protocols and softwares are also specifically developed in order to facilitate data entry and the search of information by scientific community. In palynology and palaeobotany, especially for the Neogene, storing and integrating information about fossil and recent materials play a key-role: hence data from floristics, taxonomy, ecology (chorol- ogy), biogeography, palaeontology and geology are needed. Good examples are the European Pollen Database (EPD, http://www. europeanpollendatabase.net; http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/ epd/epd_main.html), CHITINOS (Achab et al., 2000), PALAE- OFLORA (Paleoclimate Reconstructions using Tertiary Plant Taxa, Utescher and Mosbrugger, 1990–2007 , http://www.palaeoflora.de) and PaleoTax (Lo ¨ser, 2004). For modern floras, databases include LEDA (Northwest European flora, Kleyer et al., 2008), BASECO (Mediterranean French flora, Gachet et al., 2005) and the Ecological Flora Database (Britain flora, Fitter and Peat, 1994). CENOFITA 1.2 is a small database for late Cenozoic floras of Italy developed at the Department of Earth Sciences, Turin University. During the last 20 years, data from late Cenozoic sites with plant macrofossils, especially fruits and seeds, have been collected and organized in Microsoft Excel Ø sheets. The information included in this database has been constantly updated and revised for the fields that pertain to taxonomy, nomenclature, age of fossil sites and liter- ature references. Queries allow extraction of qualitative and quanti- tative floral lists from the database, which may pertain to individual sediment samples, layers or localities. The link to the ecological and morphological information for each taxon makes CENOFITA 1.2 * Corresponding author. E-mail address: elena.vassio@unito.it (E. Vassio). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Quaternary International journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/quaint 1040-6182/$ – see front matter Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd and INQUA. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.quaint.2009.08.020 Quaternary International 225 (2010) 25–36