sPlotOpen – An environmentally balanced, open-access, global dataset of vegetation plots

Research output: Journal contributionsJournal articlesResearchpeer-review

Authors

  • Francesco Maria Sabatini
  • Jonathan Lenoir
  • Tarek Hattab
  • Elise Aimee Arnst
  • Milan Chytrý
  • Jürgen Dengler
  • Patrice De Ruffray
  • Stephan M. Hennekens
  • Ute Jandt
  • Florian Jansen
  • Borja Jiménez-Alfaro
  • Jens Kattge
  • Aurora Levesley
  • Valério D. Pillar
  • Oliver Purschke
  • Brody Sandel
  • Fahmida Sultana
  • Tsipe Aavik
  • Svetlana Aćić
  • Alicia T.R. Acosta
  • Emiliano Agrillo
  • Miguel Alvarez
  • Iva Apostolova
  • Mohammed A.S. Arfin Khan
  • Luzmila Arroyo
  • Fabio Attorre
  • Isabelle Aubin
  • Arindam Banerjee
  • Marijn Bauters
  • Yves Bergeron
  • Erwin Bergmeier
  • Idoia Biurrun
  • Anne D. Bjorkman
  • Gianmaria Bonari
  • Viktoria Bondareva
  • Jörg Brunet
  • Andraž Čarni
  • Laura Casella
  • Luis Cayuela
  • Tomáš Černý
  • Victor Chepinoga
  • János Csiky
  • Renata Ćušterevska
  • Els De Bie
  • André Luis de Gasper
  • Michele De Sanctis
  • Panayotis Dimopoulos
  • Jiri Dolezal
  • Tetiana Dziuba
  • Mohamed Abd El Rouf Mousa El-Sheikh
  • Brian Enquist
  • Jörg Ewald
  • Farideh Fazayeli
  • Richard Field
  • Manfred Finckh
  • Sophie Gachet
  • Antonio Galán-de-Mera
  • Emmanuel Garbolino
  • Hamid Gholizadeh
  • Melisa Giorgis
  • Valentin Golub
  • Inger Greve Alsos
  • John Arvid Grytnes
  • Gregory Richard Guerin
  • Alvaro G. Gutiérrez
  • Mohamed Z. Hatim
  • Bruno Hérault
  • Guillermo Hinojos Mendoza
  • Norbert Hölzel
  • Jürgen Homeier
  • Wannes Hubau
  • Adrian Indreica
  • John A.M. Janssen
  • Birgit Jedrzejek
  • Anke Jentsch
  • Norbert Jürgens
  • Zygmunt Kącki
  • Jutta Kapfer
  • Dirk Nikolaus Karger
  • Ali Kavgacı
  • Elizabeth Kearsley
  • Michael Kessler
  • Larisa Khanina
  • Timothy Killeen
  • Andrey Korolyuk
  • Holger Kreft
  • Hjalmar S. Kühl
  • Anna Kuzemko
  • Flavia Landucci
  • Attila Lengyel
  • Frederic Lens
  • Débora Vanessa Lingner
  • Hongyan Liu
  • Tatiana Lysenko
  • Miguel D. Mahecha
  • Corrado Marcenò
  • Vasiliy Martynenko
  • Jesper Erenskjold Moeslund
  • Abel Monteagudo Mendoza
  • Ladislav Mucina
  • Jonas V. Müller
  • Jérôme Munzinger
  • Alireza Naqinezhad
  • Jalil Noroozi
  • Arkadiusz Nowak
  • Viktor Onyshchenko
  • Gerhard E. Overbeck
  • Meelis Pärtel
  • Aníbal Pauchard
  • Robert K. Peet
  • Josep Peñuelas
  • Aaron Pérez-Haase
  • Tomáš Peterka
  • Petr Petřík
  • Gwendolyn Peyre
  • Oliver L. Phillips
  • Vadim Prokhorov
  • Valerijus Rašomavičius
  • Rasmus Revermann
  • Gonzalo Rivas-Torres
  • John S. Rodwell
  • Eszter Ruprecht
  • Solvita Rūsiņa
  • Cyrus Samimi
  • Marco Schmidt
  • Franziska Schrodt
  • Hanhuai Shan
  • Pavel Shirokikh
  • Jozef Šibík
  • Urban Šilc
  • Petr Sklenář
  • Željko Škvorc
  • Ben Sparrow
  • Marta Gaia Sperandii
  • Zvjezdana Stančić
  • Jens Christian Svenning
  • Zhiyao Tang
  • Cindy Q. Tang
  • Ioannis Tsiripidis
  • Kim André Vanselow
  • Rodolfo Vásquez Martínez
  • Kiril Vassilev
  • Eduardo Vélez-Martin
  • Roberto Venanzoni
  • Alexander Christian Vibrans
  • Cyrille Violle
  • Risto Virtanen
  • Viktoria Wagner
  • Donald A. Walker
  • Donald M. Waller
  • Hua Feng Wang
  • Karsten Wesche
  • Timothy J.S. Whitfeld
  • Wolfgang Willner
  • Susan K. Wiser
  • Thomas Wohlgemuth
  • Sergey Yamalov
  • Martin Zobel
  • Helge Bruelheide

Motivation: Assessing biodiversity status and trends in plant communities is critical for understanding, quantifying and predicting the effects of global change on ecosystems. Vegetation plots record the occurrence or abundance of all plant species co-occurring within delimited local areas. This allows species absences to be inferred, information seldom provided by existing global plant datasets. Although many vegetation plots have been recorded, most are not available to the global research community. A recent initiative, called ‘sPlot’, compiled the first global vegetation plot database, and continues to grow and curate it. The sPlot database, however, is extremely unbalanced spatially and environmentally, and is not open-access. Here, we address both these issues by (a) resampling the vegetation plots using several environmental variables as sampling strata and (b) securing permission from data holders of 105 local-to-regional datasets to openly release data. We thus present sPlotOpen, the largest open-access dataset of vegetation plots ever released. sPlotOpen can be used to explore global diversity at the plant community level, as ground truth data in remote sensing applications, or as a baseline for biodiversity monitoring. Main types of variable contained: Vegetation plots (n = 95,104) recording cover or abundance of naturally co-occurring vascular plant species within delimited areas. sPlotOpen contains three partially overlapping resampled datasets (c. 50,000 plots each), to be used as replicates in global analyses. Besides geographical location, date, plot size, biome, elevation, slope, aspect, vegetation type, naturalness, coverage of various vegetation layers, and source dataset, plot-level data also include community-weighted means and variances of 18 plant functional traits from the TRY Plant Trait Database. Spatial location and grain: Global, 0.01–40,000 m². Time period and grain: 1888–2015, recording dates. Major taxa and level of measurement: 42,677 vascular plant taxa, plot-level records. Software format: Three main matrices (.csv), relationally linked.

Original languageEnglish
JournalGlobal Ecology and Biogeography
Volume30
Issue number9
Pages (from-to)1740-1764
Number of pages25
ISSN1466-822X
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 09.2021

    Research areas

  • big data, biodiversity, biogeography, database, functional traits, macroecology, vascular plants, vegetation plots
  • Biology
  • Ecosystems Research

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DOI