Vegbank Use Policy

Intellectual property rights and disclaimers

To upload material to VegBank the submitter must confirm possession of the right to distribute the submitted material and must either convey that right to the Ecological Society of America in the form of transfer of copyright or confirm that ESA holds that right owing to the information being in the public domain or being available through the fair-use provisions of US copyright law.

A submitter may, at the time of submission, stipulate that location information be held confidential, or that an entire plot record be held confidential. Details and conditions for such stipulations are available upon request.

Data downloaded from VegBank and used in some subsequent work must be identified in that work by reference to VegBank Accession Code(s) and the date(s) of the download.

VegBank is managed by the Vegetation Panel of the Ecological Society of America as a public service. It is the intent of ESA to work with partner organizations to assure the long-term availability of data deposited in VegBank so as to allow citation of the information in scholarly works and other derivative products. Nonetheless, in so doing ESA makes no guarantees as to the long-term maintenance or availability of information deposited in VegBank. In addition ESA provides no warrantee or guarantee as to the accurateness or completeness of the information in VegBank.

ESA reserves the right to reject submissions that appear not to meet standards for submission published in the Vegetation Panel standards document. The primary check will be a software filter applied at time of submission, but subsequent review by management staff may also lead to rejection. The submitter will be notified by email if a submission is later rejected.