Biodiversity and Vegetation: Patterns, Processes, Conservation was a title of the 57^th Annual Symposium of the International Association for Vegetation Science (IAVS) held in Perth (Australia) in September 2014. The Kwongan Foundation established in 2006 for conservation of Australia's biodiversity was a co-organizer of the Symposium. The 57^th  annual Symposium of the International Association for Vegetation Science was dedicated to Professor David Goodall, who celebrated his 100^th Anniversary earlier the same year. Participation of many young researchers from all over the world supported by the IAVS that gave them opportunity to come to remote Western Australia was the highlight of the Symposium. 270 scholars from 34 countries participated in Symposium. There were 4 parallel sessions. The main topics of the sessions were: large-scale vegetation surveys, functional traits, diversity patterns and drivers, biodiversity and conservation, climate and assembly, syntaxonomy. Ecoinformatics and databases were one of the most important sessions, especially for participants from Europe.

Vegetation database compilation within the Europe started in March 1992, when phytosociologists from 15 European countries gathered in Rome to launch an initiative to encourage vegetation surveys at the European level. The mission of the working group (European Vegetation Survey shortly EVS) was to develop a more coherent picture of vegetation across Europe. Within the activities of the EVS, a survey of vegetation types in Europe was developed, starting at the highest level, at the phytosociological class, and then moving down to the level of alliances.

The recent survey shows that there are records of more than 4.300.000 vegetation plots in Europe, more than 1.800.000 of which are already computerized. From them, about 75% are stored in central databases, mostly of the national level, including 60% is in TURBOVEG format. The biggest database in Europe is the European Vegetation Archive (EVA), which includes 553.228 releves. These releves could be located in the centralized pan-European database. Unfortunately, the National Vegetation Database in Ukraine does not exist so far. Creation of such database in Ukraine using the accepted in European countries software is a priority task.

Classification of different types of vegetation is also urgent nowadays in Europe. Several international projects on vegetation surveys started including WetVegEurope, European Fen vegetation, Floodplain Forest Database, European Forest Habitat Classification, Towards a Consistent Classification of European Grasslands.

Southwest Australia is a biodiversity hotspot that includes the Mediterranean forests, woodlands, and scrub ecoregions of Western Australia. The region has a wet-winter and dry-summer Mediterranean climat, one of the five such regions in the world. Vegetation in the region is mainly woody, with no grasslands. Predominant vegetation types are Eucalyptus woodlands, Eucalyptus-dominated Mallee shrublands, and kwongan shrublands and heathlands, which correspond to the chaparral, matorral, and maquis found in other Mediterranean-type regions. The region has generally nutrient-poor sandy or lateritic soils, which has encouraged rich speciation of plants adapted to specific ecological niches.

Keywords: symposium, phytocoenology, development tendencies, vegetation types, Western Australia

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