sPlot: the database for exploration of all aspects of global plant community diversity
The sPlot database is the first vegetation-plot database with global coverage and standardised plant nomenclature, header data, functional traits and environmental variables. According to the sPlot Rules, the use of the sPlot data is restricted to author teams led by an sPlot Consortium member.
sPlot is the name of a working group resulting from the first meeting of the Synthesis Centre (sDiv) of the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv). The acronym combines “s” from the synthesis perspective of all sDiv workshops with “plot” standing for the first representative global vegetation-plot database. This first workshop aimed to assess the relative importance of macroclimate in explaining trait variation in local plant communities worldwide, which was achieved with the publication of the paper "Global trait-environment relationships of plant communities" with participation of all sPlot members.
sPlot keeps developing as the reference database for vegetation data worldwide, including both the spatial and temporal facets of plant biodiversity. Its current version (sPlot 4.0) contains 2.5 million plot observations, of which more than 280,000 are longitudinal time-series observations. As expected, the scientific scope of sPlot broadened from its initial aim for the first workshop. Nowadays, the overarching scientific goal of sPlot is the exploration of all aspects of global plant community diversity, including taxonomic, functional, and phylogenetic diversity, across biomes, vegetation types, taxonomic or functional guilds and scales. Specifically, sPlot fosters plant biodiversity research focusing on three main topics: global biodiversity patterns, global biodiversity trends in a changing world, and community trait-environment modelling.
sPlot cooperates with the global trait database TRY. Accordingly, trait data newly gathered during the assembly of the sPlot database will be included in and handled by TRY. sPlot releases are connected to a nomenclatural matched and gap-filled version of TRY 5.0. Since the cleaning and standardisation of the sPlot data and the matching with TRY is a time consuming process as well as because we want to achieve best possible repeatability and comparability of results of sPlot-based studies, we intend to release sPlot in fixed versions approximately every 18 months.
sPlot also cooperates closely with the European Vegetation Archive. Both sPlot and EVA are built from data initially processed in the software Turboveg. Therefore, custodians of datasets contributed to EVA can simply manifest their interest in contributing also to sPlot; the data transference is arranged by the sPlot coordinator and the manager of Turboveg.
