- License: Apache 2
- Package source code on GitHub
- Submit Bugs and feature requests
- Contact us: help@vegbank.org
The VegBank data system provides a community managed data portal for vegetation plot data, with special emphasis on supporting the U.S. National Vegetation Classification (USNVC) and validating standard USNVC vegetation types. VegBank is a product of the Ecological Society of America (ESA) Panel on Vegetation Classification and is maintained and operated by the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS).
VegBank provides a common storage system and services for accessing:
- Plot data
- Plant taxonomy data
- Community data
VegBank is an open source, community project. We welcome contributions in many forms, including code, graphics, documentation, bug reports, testing, etc. Use the VegBank discussions to discuss these contributions with us.
VegBank was originally designed and implemented in the early 2000's using server technology of the time, particularly as a Java servlet providing access to data that is stored in a backend postgresql database, and using Apache Struts to build a web-based interface for querying and viewing the data. While the system has served well, most of these technology components have become obsolete, and need to be replaced.
As part of the VegBank redesign effort, the original monolithic system has been refactored into multiple standalone components:
- vegbank-service: the VegBank data storage system and REST API (this repository)
- vegbankr: the VegBank R package that accesses the service
- vegbank-web: the VegBank web application that accesses the service
Warning
The API service is currently in beta. Services are likely to go up and down, features are subject to change, and the returned data do not necessarily reflect the current production VegBank system.
The VegBank REST API is the primary interface for interacting with the data system. While this repository contains the service's source code, most users will interact with the production instance hosted and maintained by NCEAS. The API provides a programmatic way to search and retrieve vegetation plot records, plant concepts, community types, and other supporting information, as well as submit and upload new data to the archive.
- Comprehensive API documentation (WIP): https://nceas.github.io/vegbank2/api/
- Development API: https://api-dev.vegbank.org
This is a python package, and built using the Python Poetry build tool.
To install locally, create a virtual environment for python 3.12+, install poetry, and then install
or build the package with poetry install or poetry build, respectively.
To run tests, navigate to the root directory and run poetry run pytest. If the test suite contains
tests that take a longer time to run (e.g., relating to the storage of large files) - mark them as
slow and to execute all tests, run pytest --run-slow.
The GitHub repository has also been configured to run a continuous integration
build which executes the poetry run pytest command in
the standard poetry-maintained virtual environment. To test the action run locally, you can install
the act commandline client (e.g., brew install act) and then execute the actions from the local
commandline. This depends on a local docker instance being configured, and the first run will take
longer as the initial docker images are pulled. Thereafter, checking the action build before pushing
commits can be run, for example, for the mac with:
act --container-architecture linux/amd64
- Matthew B. Jones (jones@nceas.ucsb.edu): ORCID: 0000-0003-0077-4738
- Jim Regetz (regetz@nceas.ucsb.edu): ORCID: 0009-0008-2666-6229
- Robert Shelton (rshelton@nceas.ucsb.edu)
- Darian Gill (dgill@nceas.ucsb.edu)
- Dou Mok (mok@nceas.ucsb.edu): ORCID: 0000-0002-6076-8092
- Michael T. Lee
- Robert K. Peet
- Michael D. Jennings
- Dennis Grossman
- Marilyn D. Walker
- Mark Anderson
- Gabriel Farrell
- John Harris
- Chad Berkley
Copyright [2026] [Regents of the University of California]
Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
You may obtain a copy of the License at
http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
limitations under the License.
Work on this package was supported by:
- California Department of Fish and Wildlife
- DataONE Network
- National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, a Center funded by the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the State of California.
- National Science Foundation
