Abstract
AbstractMotivationAssessing 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 containedVegetation 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 grainGlobal, 0.01–40,000 m².Time period and grain1888–2015, recording dates.Major taxa and level of measurement42,677 vascular plant taxa, plot‐level records.Software formatThree main matrices (.csv), relationally linked.
Highlights
Note: Datasets are ordered based on their ID in the Global Index of Vegetation Databases (GVID ID)
The ‘CWM_CWV’ matrix contains the community-weighted. We report both the taxon name as originally contribmeans and variances calculated for each of the 18 functional traits uted by the data custodian, and the taxon mentioned above
Considering the number of species, 68,041 plots have functional trait information for 80% or more of the species occurring in that plot
Summary
Francesco Maria Sabatini and Jonathan Lenoir contributed equally to this work. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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