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

Sabatini, F.M., Lenoir, J., Hattab, T., Arnst, E., Chytrý, M., Dengler, J., De Ruffray, P., Hennekens, S.M., Jandt, U., Jansen, F., Jimenez‐Alfaro, B., Kattge, J., Levesley, A., Pillar, V.D., Purschke, O., Sandel, B., Sultana, F., Aavik, T., Aćić, S., Acosta, A.T.R., Agrillo, E., Álvarez, M., Apostolova, I., Arfin Khan, M.A.S., Arroyo, L., Attorre, F., Aubin, I., Banerjee, A., Bauters, M., Bergeron, Y., Bergmeier, E., Biurrun, I., Bjorkman, A.D., Bonari, G., Bondareva, V., Brunet, J., Čarni, A., Casella, L., Cayuela, L., Černý, T., Chepinoga, V., Csiky, J., Ćušterevska, R., De Bie, E., Gasper, A.L., De Sanctis, M., Dimopoulos, P., Dolezal, J., Dziuba, T., El‐Sheikh, M.A.El‐R.M., Enquist, B., Ewald, J., Fazayeli, F., Field, R., Finckh, M., Gachet, S., Galán‐de‐Mera, A., Garbolino, E., Gholizadeh, H., Giorgis, M., Golub, V., Alsos, I.G., Grytnes, J‐A, Guerin, G.R., Gutiérrez, A.G., Haider, S., Hatim, M.Z., Hérault, B., Hinojos Mendoza, G., Hölzel, N., Homeier, J., Hubau, W., Indreica, A., Janssen, J.A.M., Jedrzejek, B., Jentsch, A., Jürgens, N., Kącki, Z., Kapfer, J., Karger, D.N., Kavgacı, A., Kearsley, E., Kessler, M., Khanina, L., Killeen, T., Korolyuk, A., Kreft, H., Kühl, H.S., Kuzemko, A., Landucci, F., Lengyel, A., Lens, F., Lingner, D.V., Liu, H., Lysenko, T., Mahecha, M.D., Marcenò, C., Martynenko, V., Moeslund, J.E., Monteagudo Mendoza, A., Mucina, L., Müller, J.V., Munzinger, J., Naqinezhad, A., Noroozi, J., Nowak, A., Onyshchenko, V., Overbeck, G.E., Pärtel, M., Pauchard, A., Peet, R.K., Penuelas, J., Pérez‐Haase, A., Peterka, T., Petřík, P., Peyre, G., Phillips, O.L., Prokhorov, V., Rašomavičius, V., Revermann, R., Rivas‐Torres, G., Rodwell, J.S., Ruprecht, E., Rūsiņa, S., Samimi, C., Schmidt, M., Schrodt, F., Shan, H., Shirokikh, P., Šibík, J., Šilc, U., Sklenář, P., Škvorc, Ž., Sparrow, B., Sperandii, M.G., Stančić, Z., Svenning, J‐C, Tang, Z., Tang, C.Q., Tsiripidis, I., Vanselow, K.A., Vásquez Martínez, R., Vassilev, K., Vélez‐Martin, E., Venanzoni, R., Vibrans, A.C., Violle, C., Virtanen, R., Wehrden, H., Wagner, V., Walker, D.A., Waller, D.M., Wang, H‐F, Wesche, K., Whitfeld, T.J.S., Willner, W., Wiser, S.K., Wohlgemuth, T., Yamalov, S., Zobel, M., Bruelheide, H. and Bates, A. (2021) sPlotOpen – An environmentally balanced, open‐access, global dataset of vegetation plots. Global Ecology and Biogeography . Early View.

Abstract

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.

Item Type:	Journal Article
Murdoch Affiliation(s):	Harry Butler Institute
Publisher:	Wiley-Blackwell
Copyright:	© 2021 The Authors.
URI:	http://researchrepository.murdoch.edu.au/id/eprint/61337

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