sPlotOpen is the biggest public global vegetation database, with data on plant species co-occurrence for 95,104 vegetation plots. Beyond species abundances, sPlotOpen also includes functional data from the TRY Plant Trait Database as community-weighted means and variances calculated for every vegetation plot. In addition to that, it also contains sampling and environmental information at the plot level, like geographical location, date, plot size, biome, elevation, slope, aspect, and vegetation type.

sPlotOpen was lauched with the publication of a data paper in 2021 by Sabatini and co-authors, and all data and metadata can be download through iData, the Data Portal of iDiv, at this link. Moreover, details on the development of sPlotOpen can be accessed on its GitHub repository.

Nevertheless, sPlotOpen is meant to be an evolving database with new releases expanding its spatial coverage. Stay tunned for updates!