sPlot Meeting

The scientists behind the global vegetation-plot database sPlot have released a new version of the database which contains over 1.1 million vegetation plots from 130 countries covering all biomes of the Earth. sPlot constitutes a unique data source of fine-grain species co-occurrence data with unprecedented spatial coverage. Version 2.1 is now clean of inconsistencies, has harmonized species names and allows separate analyses of grasslands and forests. The sPlot Consortium has more than 100 members and contributing scientists from all around the world. Nineteen of them met during end of October at iDiv in Leipzig for the sPlot III workshop. „We are happy to note the great interest in the community to use the database. At the moment we are working on six publications and discussed during the last days ideas for a dozen further papers“, said Prof Dr Jürgen Dengler of the University of Bayreuth. His colleague Dr Oliver Purschke of iDiv added: “Because more than 70 percent of the most common species in sPlot are also contained in the  global plant trait database TRY, we are now able to carry out trait-based analyses at the plant community level  across all major biogeographic regions on earth” The combination of both databases could improve the knowledge how the global change will change the properties of vegetation in future. And the combination with the database of GloNAF (Global Naturalized Alien Flora) could help to understand which species are invasive and what kind of communities are vulnerable for invasive species. More about Meeting III of sPlot: https://www.idiv.de/en/sdiv/working_groups/wg_pool/splot/meeting_iii.html

More about sPlot:
https://www.idiv.de/en/sdiv/working_groups/wg_pool/splot.html