IranVeg – The Vegetation Database of Iran: Current status and the way forward

Prepared by Soghra Ramzi, Jalil Noroozi, Hamid Gholizadeh, Behnam Hamzeh’ee, Younes Asri, Amir Talebi, Halime Moradi, Parastoo Mahdavi, Seyedeh Saeedeh Tamjidi Eramsadati, Somayeh Zarezadeh, Asghar Kamrani, Omid Esmailzadeh, Atefeh Ghorbanalizadeh, Maral Bashirzadeh, Adel Jalili, Jaber Sharifi, Aiuob Moradi, Mahmoud Bidarlord, Soudeh Siadati, Sajad Lotfi, Farideh Attar, Maedeh Mohammadpour Darzi, Zeynab Kazemi Gorji, Sharyan Ghasemi, Mehdi Dehghani, Soroor Rahmanian, Ali Esmailpoor, Anvar Sanaei, Sahar Ghafari, Parvaneh Ashouri, Arshad Ali, Abdolrahman Dehghani, Somayeh Hosseini, Hajar Hamedani, Samereh Tirgan, Mohaddeseh Maghsoudi, Aliakbar Daneshi, Javad Eshaghi Rad, Mohammadreza Eslami, Mahdis Ramezani, Zahra Mehrabi, Zahra Naqipour, Nadia Naseri, Hossein Bahari, Maryam Ashouri, Narges Vasefi, Seyed Abbas Seyedakhlaghi, Hamid Ejtehadi, Mohammad Farzam, Somayeh Mokhtari, Morteza Djamali, Elias Ramezani, Habib Zare, Nahid Masudian, Raheleh Alinejad, Mojdeh Kasiri, Mahboubeh Sadat Hosseini, Masoumeh Raeisi, Hooman Ravanbakhsh, Franz Essl, Hamid Jalilvand, Mehdi Abedi, Khadijeh Bahalkeh, and Alireza Naqinezhad

Iran is home to some of the world’s most diverse landscapes, ranging from lush deciduous forests and grasslands to arid deserts and wetlands. This incredible diversity arises from Iran’s complex climate, topography, geography, and rich history. Understanding and preserving this unique biodiversity, however, requires detailed records of its vegetation.

To address this need, we developed IranVeg, Iran’s first national vegetation database. This project compiles over 13,400 vegetation plots gathered from decades of research, covering forests, grasslands, steppes, alpine habitats, wetlands, deserts, and human-altered landscapes. The database contains information about more than 3,900 plant species, making it an essential resource for studying and protecting Iran’s rich flora and vegetation.

IranVeg is more than just a scientific achievement—it is a crucial step toward sustainable development and conservation in Iran. By making this data available to researchers, conservationists, and policymakers, the database aims to inspire better management of natural resources and ensure biodiversity is protected for future generations.

The database is designed to grow, with scientists across Iran continuously contributing new data. It also has the potential to connect with global initiatives, placing Iran’s unique vegetation in a broader global context of biodiversity conservation.

IranVeg is managed as a self-governed consortium, and every data contributor becomes a member. To coordinate its development, a Custodian and two Deputy Custodians have been provisionally elected, with A. Naqinezhad serving as the current Custodian and J. Noroozi and S. Ramzi as the Deputy Custodians.

This is a plain language summary for the paper of Ramzi et al. (2024) published in the Vegetation Classification and Survey (https://doi.org/10.3897/VCS.114081)