Ruff et al. 2019
Systems to gain and document the floristic status (= occurrence status) are an important measure to describe the structure of a flora in space and time. There is a distinction between in situ systems and ex situ systems. The first rely on the status assignment for single observations in the field, the latter make summary classifications („ex situ“) for each taxon in relation to a major often politically defined geographic entity. In this paper we describe the progress on using status systems for the project “Flora of Bavaria”.
Since 2013 the data collection Flora of Bavaria (BFL) is managed in the database system Diversity Workbench (DWB). The data are dynamically provided by several portals and networks: the portal „BIB“ with regional user community as well as national and international scientific portals like GBIF, GFBio and PLADIAS. Six million records of occurrence data with status assignment are organized in the software DiversityCollection (DWB-DC). The absolute majority of these data are categorized as so-called „Normalstatus“, which means native in a wide sense. Several figures show the distribution of the values of the status according to the basis of occurrence record, time span of record and kind of relation to the geographical area.
A second kind of floristic status is managed in the software DiversityTaxonNames (DWB-DTN) since 2015. It is assigned to the taxa organized as taxonomic reference list of vascular plants in Bavaria (“Taxonomische Referenzliste der Gefäßpflanzen Bayerns – TaxRef”) and is independent from the „in situ“ status described above. The „ex situ“ floristic status of a taxon is named its „Bayernstatus and processed as a feature for each of the currently 6.999 accepted taxa on species level and below. Both types of status are compared.
The changing values of the „in situ“ floristic status assigned to the taxa over the time give a first hint on the change of the flora during the last 60 years. This estimation is confirmed by the „ex situ“ values „Bayernstatus“ as published in four versions of the „Taxonomische Referenzliste“ within the last 15 years. It is suggested to use the calculation of a neophyte presence value of a flora based on the assessment of the "in situ" floristic status as well as the "ex situ" floristic status.
