Vascular Plants of Japan Database (VPJD)
The Vascular Plants of Japan Database (VPJD) is a data and analytical infrastructure project of the Oxford–Japan Plant Conservation Partnership (OJPCP) at the University of Oxford Botanic Garden & Arboretum.
VPJD integrates taxonomic, occurrence and geographic evidence for the vascular flora of Japan within a reproducible analytical framework. Its taxonomic backbone is aligned to the World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP), while geographic evidence is represented through a controlled geographic vocabulary and reproducible taxon-by-area distribution model.
Research framework
VPJD separates three related components:
- Taxonomy: a recognised, WCVP-aligned taxonomic backbone for the vascular flora of Japan.
- Geographic evidence: reproducible evidence linking recognised taxa to geographic units within Japan and relevant wider geographic concepts.
- Conservation analysis: downstream analysis of distribution, geographic rarity, endemicity and conservation significance, including development and application of the Nakamura Key to Stars and plant-focused conservation assessments.
Maintaining these components separately allows the underlying taxonomic and geographic evidence to be versioned and reproduced independently of subsequent conservation interpretation.
Published data
VPJD data products are published as versioned research datasets with persistent DOIs. Frozen releases are deposited in Zenodo together with supporting metadata, provenance information and validation outputs.
The initial releases comprise the VPJD Taxonomic Release v1.0.0 and VPJD Geography Release v1.0.0. Future versions and associated research outputs will be curated through this community.
Reproducibility
The analytical workflows used to construct and validate VPJD are maintained in the project's GitHub repository. The workflow incorporates explicit validation and release gates, provenance documentation, package manifests and cryptographic checksums to support reproducibility and long-term data integrity.
Oxford–Japan Plant Conservation Partnership
VPJD forms part of the Oxford–Japan Plant Conservation Partnership (OJPCP), supporting collaborative research and conservation of the Japanese flora through integrated botanical collections, field research, biodiversity data and conservation analysis.
Project lead: Ben Jones, University of Oxford Botanic Garden and Arboretum; University of Oxford, Department of Biology
ORCID: 0000-0003-1430-004X