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Research article - Peer-reviewed, 2021

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

Sabatini, Francesco Maria; Lenoir, Jonathan; Hattab, Tarek; Arnst, Elise Aimee; Chytry, Milan; Dengler, Juergen; De Ruffray, Patrice; Hennekens, Stephan M.; Jandt, Ute; Jansen, Florian; Jimenez-Alfaro, Borja; Kattge, Jens; Levesley, Aurora; Pillar, Valerio D.; Purschke, Oliver; Sandel, Brody; Sultana, Fahmida; Aavik, Tsipe; Acic, Svetlana; Acosta, Alicia T. R.; Agrillo, Emiliano; Alvarez, Miguel; Apostolova, Iva; Arfin Khan, Mohammed A. S.; Arroyo, Luzmila; Attorre, Fabio; Aubin, Isabelle; Banerjee, Arindam; Bauters, Marijn; Bergeron, Yves; Bergmeier, Erwin; Biurrun, Idoia; Bjorkman, Anne D.; Bonari, Gianmaria; Bondareva, Viktoria; Brunet, Jorg; Carni, Andraz; Casella, Laura; Cayuela, Luis; Cerny, Tomas; Chepinoga, Victor; Csiky, Janos; Custerevska, Renata; De Bie, Els; de Gasper, Andre Luis; De Sanctis, Michele; Dimopoulos, Panayotis; Dolezal, Jiri; Dziuba, Tetiana; El-Sheikh, Mohamed Abd El-Rouf Mousa; Enquist, Brian; Ewald, Joerg; Fazayeli, Farideh; Field, Richard; Finckh, Manfred; Gachet, Sophie; Galan-de-Mera, Antonio; Garbolino, Emmanuel; Gholizadeh, Hamid; Giorgis, Melisa; Golub, Valentin; Alsos, Inger Greve; Grytnes, John-Arvid; Guerin, Gregory Richard; Gutierrez, Alvaro G.; Haider, Sylvia; Hatim, Mohamed Z.; Herault, Bruno; Hinojos Mendoza, Guillermo; Hoelzel, Norbert; Homeier, Juergen; Hubau, Wannes; Indreica, Adrian; Janssen, John A. M.; Jedrzejek, Birgit; Jentsch, Anke; Juergens, Norbert; Kacki, Zygmunt; Kapfer, Jutta; Karger, Dirk Nikolaus; Kavgaci, Ali; Kearsley, Elizabeth; Kessler, Michael; Khanina, Larisa; Killeen, Timothy; Korolyuk, Andrey; Kreft, Holger; Kuehl, Hjalmar S.; Kuzemko, Anna; Landucci, Flavia; Lengyel, Attila; Lens, Frederic; Lingner, Debora Vanessa; Liu, Hongyan; Lysenko, Tatiana; Mahecha, Miguel D.; Marceno, Corrado; Martynenko, Vasiliy; Moeslund, Jesper Erenskjold; Monteagudo Mendoza, Abel; Mucina, Ladislav; Muller, Jonas V.; Munzinger, Jerome; Naqinezhad, Alireza; Noroozi, Jalil; Nowak, Arkadiusz; Onyshchenko, Viktor; Overbeck, Gerhard E.; Partel, Meelis; Pauchard, Anibal; Peet, Robert K.; Penuelas, Josep; Perez-Haase, Aaron; Peterka, Tomas; Petrik, Petr; Peyre, Gwendolyn; Phillips, Oliver L.; Prokhorov, Vadim; Rasomavicius, Valerijus; Revermann, Rasmus; Rivas-Torres, Gonzalo; Rodwell, John S.; Ruprecht, Eszter; Rusina, Solvita; Samimi, Cyrus; Schmidt, Marco; Schrodt, Franziska; Shan, Hanhuai; Shirokikh, Pavel; Sibik, Jozef; Silc, Urban; Sklenar, Petr; Skvorc, Zeljko; Sparrow, Ben; Sperandii, Marta Gaia; Stancic, Zvjezdana; Svenning, Jens-Christian; Tang, Zhiyao; Tang, Cindy Q.; Tsiripidis, Ioannis; Vanselow, Kim Andre; Vasquez Martinez, Rodolfo; Vassilev, Kiril; Velez-Martin, Eduardo; Venanzoni, Roberto; Vibrans, Alexander Christian; Violle, Cyrille; Virtanen, Risto; von Wehrden, Henrik; Wagner, Viktoria; Walker, Donald A.; Waller, Donald M.; Wang, Hua-Feng; Wesche, Karsten; Whitfeld, Timothy J. S.; Willner, Wolfgang; Wiser, Susan K.; Wohlgemuth, Thomas; Yamalov, Sergey; Zobel, Martin; Bruelheide, Helge
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Abstract

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 m(2). 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.

Keywords

big data; biodiversity; biogeography; database; functional traits; macroecology; vascular plants; vegetation plots

Published in

Global Ecology and Biogeography
2021, Volume: 30, number: 9, pages: 1740-1764
Publisher: WILEY

    Sustainable Development Goals

    SDG15 Life on land

    UKÄ Subject classification

    Ecology

    Publication identifier

    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/geb.13346

    Permanent link to this page (URI)

    https://res.slu.se/id/publ/112758