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 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 language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1740-1764 |
| Number of pages | 25 |
| Journal | Global Ecology and Biogeography |
| Volume | 30 |
| Issue number | 9 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Sep 2021 |
Keywords
- big data
- biodiversity
- biogeography
- database
- functional traits
- macroecology
- vascular plants
- vegetation plots
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Global and Planetary Change
- Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
- Ecology
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sPlotOpen – An environmentally balanced, open-access, global dataset of vegetation plots. / Sabatini, Francesco Maria; Lenoir, Jonathan; Hattab, Tarek et al.
In: Global Ecology and Biogeography, Vol. 30, No. 9, 09.2021, p. 1740-1764.Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
}
TY - JOUR
T1 - sPlotOpen – An environmentally balanced, open-access, global dataset of vegetation plots
AU - Sabatini, Francesco Maria
AU - Lenoir, Jonathan
AU - Hattab, Tarek
AU - Arnst, Elise Aimee
AU - Chytrý, Milan
AU - Dengler, Jürgen
AU - De Ruffray, Patrice
AU - Hennekens, Stephan M.
AU - Jandt, Ute
AU - Jansen, Florian
AU - Jiménez-Alfaro, Borja
AU - Kattge, Jens
AU - Levesley, Aurora
AU - Pillar, Valério D.
AU - Purschke, Oliver
AU - Sandel, Brody
AU - Sultana, Fahmida
AU - Aavik, Tsipe
AU - Aćić, Svetlana
AU - Acosta, Alicia T.R.
AU - Agrillo, Emiliano
AU - Alvarez, Miguel
AU - Apostolova, Iva
AU - Arfin Khan, Mohammed A.S.
AU - Arroyo, Luzmila
AU - Attorre, Fabio
AU - Aubin, Isabelle
AU - Banerjee, Arindam
AU - Bauters, Marijn
AU - Bergeron, Yves
AU - Bergmeier, Erwin
AU - Biurrun, Idoia
AU - Bjorkman, Anne D.
AU - Bonari, Gianmaria
AU - Bondareva, Viktoria
AU - Brunet, Jörg
AU - Čarni, Andraž
AU - Casella, Laura
AU - Cayuela, Luis
AU - Černý, Tomáš
AU - Chepinoga, Victor
AU - Csiky, János
AU - Ćušterevska, Renata
AU - De Bie, Els
AU - de Gasper, André Luis
AU - De Sanctis, Michele
AU - Dimopoulos, Panayotis
AU - Dolezal, Jiri
AU - Dziuba, Tetiana
AU - El-Sheikh, Mohamed Abd El Rouf Mousa
AU - Enquist, Brian
AU - Ewald, Jörg
AU - Fazayeli, Farideh
AU - Field, Richard
AU - Finckh, Manfred
AU - Gachet, Sophie
AU - Galán-de-Mera, Antonio
AU - Garbolino, Emmanuel
AU - Gholizadeh, Hamid
AU - Giorgis, Melisa
AU - Golub, Valentin
AU - Alsos, Inger Greve
AU - Grytnes, John Arvid
AU - Guerin, Gregory Richard
AU - Gutiérrez, Alvaro G.
AU - Haider, Sylvia
AU - Hatim, Mohamed Z.
AU - Hérault, Bruno
AU - Hinojos Mendoza, Guillermo
AU - Hölzel, Norbert
AU - Homeier, Jürgen
AU - Hubau, Wannes
AU - Indreica, Adrian
AU - Janssen, John A.M.
AU - Jedrzejek, Birgit
AU - Jentsch, Anke
AU - Jürgens, Norbert
AU - Kącki, Zygmunt
AU - Kapfer, Jutta
AU - Karger, Dirk Nikolaus
AU - Kavgacı, Ali
AU - Kearsley, Elizabeth
AU - Kessler, Michael
AU - Khanina, Larisa
AU - Killeen, Timothy
AU - Korolyuk, Andrey
AU - Kreft, Holger
AU - Kühl, Hjalmar S.
AU - Kuzemko, Anna
AU - Landucci, Flavia
AU - Lengyel, Attila
AU - Lens, Frederic
AU - Lingner, Débora Vanessa
AU - Liu, Hongyan
AU - Lysenko, Tatiana
AU - Mahecha, Miguel D.
AU - Marcenò, Corrado
AU - Martynenko, Vasiliy
AU - Moeslund, Jesper Erenskjold
AU - Monteagudo Mendoza, Abel
AU - Mucina, Ladislav
AU - Müller, Jonas V.
AU - Munzinger, Jérôme
AU - Naqinezhad, Alireza
AU - Noroozi, Jalil
AU - Nowak, Arkadiusz
AU - Onyshchenko, Viktor
AU - Overbeck, Gerhard E.
AU - Pärtel, Meelis
AU - Pauchard, Aníbal
AU - Peet, Robert K.
AU - Peñuelas, Josep
AU - Pérez-Haase, Aaron
AU - Peterka, Tomáš
AU - Petřík, Petr
AU - Peyre, Gwendolyn
AU - Phillips, Oliver L.
AU - Prokhorov, Vadim
AU - Rašomavičius, Valerijus
AU - Revermann, Rasmus
AU - Rivas-Torres, Gonzalo
AU - Rodwell, John S.
AU - Ruprecht, Eszter
AU - Rūsiņa, Solvita
AU - Samimi, Cyrus
AU - Schmidt, Marco
AU - Schrodt, Franziska
AU - Shan, Hanhuai
AU - Shirokikh, Pavel
AU - Šibík, Jozef
AU - Šilc, Urban
AU - Sklenář, Petr
AU - Škvorc, Željko
AU - Sparrow, Ben
AU - Sperandii, Marta Gaia
AU - Stančić, Zvjezdana
AU - Svenning, Jens Christian
AU - Tang, Zhiyao
AU - Tang, Cindy Q.
AU - Tsiripidis, Ioannis
AU - Vanselow, Kim André
AU - Vásquez Martínez, Rodolfo
AU - Vassilev, Kiril
AU - Vélez-Martin, Eduardo
AU - Venanzoni, Roberto
AU - Vibrans, Alexander Christian
AU - Violle, Cyrille
AU - Virtanen, Risto
AU - von Wehrden, Henrik
AU - Wagner, Viktoria
AU - Walker, Donald A.
AU - Waller, Donald M.
AU - Wang, Hua Feng
AU - Wesche, Karsten
AU - Whitfeld, Timothy J.S.
AU - Willner, Wolfgang
AU - Wiser, Susan K.
AU - Wohlgemuth, Thomas
AU - Yamalov, Sergey
AU - Zobel, Martin
AU - Bruelheide, Helge
N1 - Funding Information: Isabelle Aubin was funded through the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry. Yves Bergeron was funded through the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. Idoia Biurrun was funded by the Basque Government (IT936‐16). Anne Bjorkman thanks the Herschel Island‐Qikiqtaruk Territorial Park management, Catherine Kennedy, Dorothy Cooley, Jill F. Johnstone, Cameron Eckert and Richard Gordon for establishing the ecological monitoring programme. Funding was provided by Herschel Island‐Qikiqtaruk Territorial Park. Luis Cayuela was supported by project BIOCON08_044 funded by Fundación BBVA (Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argantiera). Milan Chytrý, Flavia Landucci, Corrado Marcenò and Tomáš Peterka were supported by the Czech Science Foundation (project no. 19‐28491X). Brian Enquist thanks the following individuals and institutions for contributing data to sPlot via the SALVIAS database: Mauricio Bonifacino, Saara DeWalt, Timothy Killeen, Susan Letcher, Nigel Pitman, Cam Webb, The Missouri Botanical Garden, RAINFOR and the Amazon Forest Inventory Network. Alvaro G. Gutiérrez was funded by Project FORECOFUN‐SSA PIEF‐GA‐2010–274798 and FONDECYT 1200468. Mohamed Z. Hatim thanks Kamal Shaltout and Joop Schaminée for MSc thesis supervision, and Joop Schaminée for support and funding from the Prince Bernard Culture Fund Prize for Nature Conservation. Jürgen Homeier received funding from BMBF (Federal Ministry of Education and Science of Germany) and the German Research Foundation (DFG Ho3296‐2, DFG Ho3296‐4). Borja Jiménez‐Alfaro was funded by the Spanish Research Agency through grant AEI/10.13039/501100011033. Dirk N. Karger received funding from: the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL) internal grant exCHELSA and ClimEx, the Joint Biodiversa COFUND project ‘FeedBaCks' and ‘Futureweb', the Swiss Data Science Projects: SPEEDMIND, and COMECO, and the Swiss National Science Foundation (20BD21_184131). Hjalmar Kühl gratefully acknowledges the Pan African team and funding by the Max Planck Society and Krekeler Foundation. Attila Lengyel was supported by the National Research, Development and Innovation Office, Hungary (PD‐123997). Tatiana Lysenko was funded by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (Grant No. 16‐04‐00747a). Alireza Naqinezhad is supported by a master grant from the University of Mazandaran. Jérôme Munzinger was supported by the French National Research Agency (ANR) with grants INC (ANR‐07‐BDIV‐0008), BIONEOCAL (ANR‐07‐BDIV‐0006) & ULTRABIO (ANR‐07‐BDIV‐0010), by the National Geographic Society (Grant 7579‐04), and with funding and authorizations of North and South Provinces of New Caledonia. Arkadiusz Nowak received support from the National Science Centre, Poland, grant no. 2017/25/B/NZ8/00572. Gerhard E. Overbeck acknowledges support from Brazil's National Council of Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq, grant 310022/2015‐0). Meelis Pärtel was supported by the Estonian Research Council (PRG609) and European Regional Development Fund (Centre of Excellence EcolChange). Robert Peet acknowledges the support from the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, the North Carolina Ecosystem Enhancement Program, the U.S. Forest Service, and the U.S. National Science Foundation (DBI‐9905838, DBI‐0213794). Josep Peñuelas acknowledges the financial support from the European Research Council Synergy grant ERC‐SyG‐2013‐610028 IMBALANCE‐P. Petr Petřík and Jiri Dolezal acknowledge the support of the long‐term research development project No. RVO 67985939 of the Czech Academy of Sciences. Oliver Phillips was funded by an ERC Advanced Grant (291585, ‘T‐FORCES’) and a Royal Society‐Wolfson Research Merit Award. Valério D. Pillar was supported by the Brazil's National Council of Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq, grant 307689/2014‐0). Solvita Rūsiņa was supported by the University of Latvia grant AAP2016/B041//Zd2016/AZ03 within the ‘Climate change and sustainable use of natural resources’ framework. Franziska Schrodt was supported by the University of Minnesota Institute on the Environment Discovery Grant, the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle‐Jena‐Leipzig grant (50170649_#7) and the University of Nottingham Anne McLaren Fellowship. Jozef Šibík was funded by The Slovak Research and Development Agency grant no. APVV16‐0431. Jens‐Christian Svenning considers this work a contribution to his VILLUM Investigator project ‘Biodiversity Dynamics in a Changing World’ funded by VILLUM FONDEN (grant 16549). Kim André Vanselow would like to thank W. Bernhard Dickoré for the help in the identification of plant species and acknowledges the financial support from the Volkswagen Foundation (AZ I/81 976) and the German Research Foundation (DFG VA 749/1‐1, DFG VA 749/4‐1). Evan Weiher was funded by NSF DEB‐0415383, UWEC‐ORSP, and UWEC‐BCDT. Work by Karsten Wesche was supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG WE 2601/3‐1,3‐2, 4‐1,4‐2) and by the German Ministry for Science and Education (BMBF, CAME 03G0808A). Susan Wiser was funded by the New Zealand (NZ) Ministry for Business, Innovation and Employment's Strategic Science Investment Fund. Funding Information: The study has been supported by the TRY initiative on plant traits ( http://www.try‐db.org ). The TRY initiative and database is hosted, developed and maintained by J. Kattge and G. Bönisch (Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, Jena, Germany). TRY is currently supported by DIVERSITAS/Future Earth and iDiv Halle‐Jena‐Leipzig. Jens Kattge acknowledges support by the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry (Jena, Germany), Future Earth, iDiv Halle‐Jena‐Leipzig and the EU H2020 project BACI, Grant No. 640176. Funding Information: The authors are grateful to the thousands of vegetation scientists who sampled vegetation plots in the field or digitized them into regional, national or international databases. The authors also appreciate the support of the German Research Foundation for funding sPlot as one of the iDiv (DFG FZT 118, 202548816) research platforms, as well as for funding the position of Francesco Maria Sabatini and the organization of three workshops through the sDiv calls. The authors acknowledge this support with naming the database ‘sPlot’, where the ‘s’ refers to the sDiv synthesis workshops. The authors are also grateful to Anahita Kazem and iDiv's Data & Code Unit for assistance with curation and archiving of the dataset. Publisher Copyright: © 2021 The Authors. Global Ecology and Biogeography published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
PY - 2021/9
Y1 - 2021/9
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - big data
KW - biodiversity
KW - biogeography
KW - database
KW - functional traits
KW - macroecology
KW - vascular plants
KW - vegetation plots
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85108379972&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85108379972&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1111/geb.13346
DO - 10.1111/geb.13346
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85108379972
SN - 1466-822X
VL - 30
SP - 1740
EP - 1764
JO - Global Ecology and Biogeography
JF - Global Ecology and Biogeography
IS - 9
ER -