Since the sPlot Meeting I, people involved with sPlot started compiling a common global vegetation-plot database covering all biomes of the Earth that can be combined with the existing global trait database TRY. At the sPlot Meeting II in December 2014, a first version of the sPlot database (sPlot 1.0) was released for testing purposes and planning of research papers. Since then, the content has been extended and improved enormously. In February 2016 finally sPlot 2.0, the first release for scientific studies, was published with more than 1.1 million geo- referenced plots from all seven continents and 130 countries. Since then, sPlot was further expanded under the coordination of Borja Jiménez-Alfaro first, and Francesco Maria Sabatini then. In August 2020, sPlot v3.0 was released, which further expanded version 2.0 and included almost 2 million plots providing a better coverage of South America, Asia and Australia. On September 2023, sPlot 4.0 was released containing 2.5 milion plots, now also incorporating time-series data. This version of the datasets expands its coverage mostly in Southeast Asia, Oceania, and North Southwest Africa.

The unique characteristic of sPlot of combinig fine spatial grain with maximum spatial extent has been openning new analytical options for community ecologists and macroecologists. Please check our list of publications.