The Saproxylic Database

Welcome to explore and use the Wood decomposer database – a database that documents the ecology of species living in dying or dead woody material.

The database can be used freely by anybody who wishes to:

• learn more about the fascinating life of species living in dead wood
• improve or knowledge about these species through systematic field work or scientific research
• communicate knowledge about the species to different audiences in the society

Further details about using the database can be found under the Using the database page. 

Wood-inhabiting species

The database is designed to contain information about all species that more or less depend upon dead wood for their existence, either directly or through some other species depending on dead wood. This means that they live in dying or dead woody material during parts of, or their whole life cycle. The database includes information about wood decomposers (mostly fungi), detrivores (many invertebrate groups), fungivores (invertebrates), predators (mainly invertebrates), parasites and parasitoids (mainly invertebrates) and epixylics (mainly mosses and lichens) that grow on the surface of woody material. Under the scope of this database, woody material comprises dying or dead wood, bark and sap from live and dead trees.

Information content

The database aims to document species-specific ecology of all multi-cellular wood-inhabiting organisms. In short, the database contains information about species from all invertebrate and fungus groups that occur in Northern Europe (with a focus on the Nordic countries).  Under the Information content page/Information scope you find more information about the species groups (taxonomic groups), geographical areas and which environments the database covers. By the end of 2006, the number of species in the database was about 5500. We expect the number to approach about 7000 species during the next few years. When the database became available as a prototype Internet version in June 2007, the number of species and taxonomic groups was rather limited. The information content will increase rapidly during 2007 as increasingly more information is converted from a previous database format to this Internet format (see Development history page). 

What this database is

The main purpose of the database is to document the ecology of wood-inhabiting species. The database documents the part of their life cycle when they live in woody material. The ecology of the species includes

• their preferences for different qualities of woody material
• their preferences concerning the surrounding environment
• their functional role  (type of wood decomposer, fungivore, predator, parasitoid, etc.)
• their associations or interactions with other wood-inhabiting species.

Further details can be found under the Information content page/Ecological information)

What this database is not

Although nearly all records in this database are linked to a geographical area, this database is not an appropriate source to document the geographical distribution of species. The main reason is that there are many more records documenting the distribution of wood-inhabiting species. Records without information about associations to woody material or other wood-inhabiting species are generally not included in the database. Natural history museum collections and species observation databases are more appropriate sources to get an overview of species distributions.  Neither is this database a tool to sort out the valid nomenclature or taxonomic position of different species. The database does contain information about synonym names and taxonomic position, but it is not meant to be comprehensive in such aspects. The GBIF system is a more relevant tool to consult in these matters.

Database maintenance

The database is updated and maintained by the Nordic saproxylic network, see Saproxylic network page.