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

Sabatini, Francesco Maria; Lenoir, Jonathan; Hattab, Tarek; Arnst, Elise Aimee; Chytrý, Milan; Dengler, Jürgen; De Ruffray, Patrice; Hennekens, Stephan M.; Jandt, Ute; Jansen, Florian; Jiménez-Alfaro, Borja; Kattge, Jens; Levesley, Aurora; Pillar, Valério D.; Purschke, Oliver; Sandel, Brody; Sultana, Fahmida; Aavik, Tsipe; Aćić, 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, Jörg; Čarni, Andraž; Casella, Laura; Cayuela, Luis; Černý, Tomáš; Chepinoga, Victor; Csiky, János; Ćušterevska, Renata; De Bie, Els; de Gasper, André Luis; De Sanctis, Michele; Dimopoulos, Panayotis; Dolezal, Jiri; Dziuba, Tetiana; El-Sheikh, Mohamed Abd El Rouf Mousa; Enquist, Brian; Ewald, Jörg; Fazayeli, Farideh; Field, Richard; Finckh, Manfred; Gach...

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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

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

Sylvia Haider

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

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

Henrik Wehrden

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



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, 0.01–40,000m². 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.

Citation

Sabatini, F. M., Lenoir, J., Hattab, T., Arnst, E. A., Chytrý, M., Dengler, J., …Bruelheide, H. (2021). sPlotOpen – An environmentally balanced, open-access, global dataset of vegetation plots. Global Ecology and Biogeography, 30(9), 1740-1764. https://doi.org/10.1111/geb.13346

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date May 18, 2021
Online Publication Date Jun 21, 2021
Publication Date 2021-09
Deposit Date Feb 1, 2022
Publicly Available Date Mar 29, 2024
Journal Global Ecology and Biogeography
Print ISSN 1466-822X
Electronic ISSN 1466-8238
Publisher Wiley
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 30
Issue 9
Pages 1740-1764
DOI https://doi.org/10.1111/geb.13346
Keywords Ecology; Global and Planetary Change; Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
Public URL https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/5720265
Publisher URL https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/geb.13346

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