sPlot – A new tool for global vegetation analyses

Abstract

Lysenko 91,92 | Armin Macanović 93 | Parastoo Mahdavi 94 | Peter Manning 35 | Corrado Marcenò 13 | Vassiliy Martynenko 95 | Maurizio Mencuccini 96 | Vanessa Minden 97 | Jesper Erenskjold Moeslund 54 | Marco Moretti 98 | Jonas V. Müller 99 | Abstract Aims: Vegetation-plot records provide information on the presence and cover or abundance of plants co-occurring in the same community. Vegetation-plot data are spread across research groups, environmental agencies and biodiversity research centers and, thus, are rarely accessible at continental or global scales. Here we present the sPlot database, which collates vegetation plots worldwide to allow for the exploration of global patterns in taxonomic, functional and phylogenetic diversity at the plant community level.Results: sPlot version 2.1 contains records from 1,121,244 vegetation plots, which comprise 23,586,216 records of plant species and their relative cover or abundance in plots collected worldwide between 1885 and 2015. We complemented the information for each plot by retrieving climate and soil conditions and the biogeographic context (e.g., biomes) from external sources, and by calculating community-weighted means and variances of traits using gap-filled data from the global plant trait database TRY. Moreover, we created a phylogenetic tree for 50,167 out of the 54,519 species identified in the plots. We present the first maps of global patterns of community richness and community-weighted means of key traits. Conclusions: The availability of vegetation plot data in sPlot offers new avenues for vegetation analysis at the global scale. K E Y W O R D S biodiversity, community ecology, ecoinformatics, functional diversity, global scale, macroecology, phylogenetic diversity, plot database, sPlot, taxonomic diversity, vascular plant, vegetation relevé 166 |

Global fern and lycophyte richness explained: How regional and local factors shape plot richness

“…The data came from the sPlot consortium (Bruelheide et al, 2019), species lists from ground vegetation surveys carried out on Level II plots of the Europe-wide forest monitoring programme ICP Forests (http://www.icp-fores ts.net, Canullo, Starlinger, Granke, Fischer & Aamlid, 2016;Ferretti & Fischer, 2013), and published and unpublished data from fern and lycophyte inventories carried out by a research network on fern and lycophyte diversity (e.g. The data came from the sPlot consortium (Bruelheide et al, 2019), species lists from ground vegetation surveys carried out on Level II plots of the Europe-wide forest monitoring programme ICP Forests (http://www.icp-fores ts.net, Canullo, Starlinger, Granke, Fischer & Aamlid, 2016;Ferretti & Fischer, 2013), and published and unpublished data from fern and lycophyte inventories carried out by a research network on fern and lycophyte diversity (e.g.…”

“…Even though the importance of scale (i.e. Bruelheide et al, 2019) are becoming more widely available, allowing the study of macroecological patterns across scales on a global extent. Chase et al, 2019;Hutchinson, 1953;Levin, 1992;Rahbek, 2005;Ricklefs, 1987;Whittaker, 1977), the full implementation of scale effects in global analyses has been hindered by lack of both data and appropriate methods (Beck et al, 2012).…”

Modeling biodiversity benchmarks in variable environments

“…Field testing of these benchmarks in real world applications, such as assessing biodiversity values to support biodiversity management, will provide valuable feedback on the validity of the estimated benchmarks and on key details of implementation, such as the identification of appropriate quantiles to define best-on-offer reference states. We believe our approach is general and could be used broadly to calculate transparent and updateable biodiversity targets in dynamic environments, especially given unprecedented and global access to 'big data' such as floristic inventories stored in data warehouses (Franklin et al 2017, Bruelheide et al 2019).…”

“…Increasing availability of archived data (Bruelheide et al. ) allows data‐driven benchmarks to be calculated rapidly over large spatial extents, a process that would be expensive and time‐consuming using expert elicitation.…”

DarkDivNet – A global research collaboration to explore the dark diversity of plant communities

“…Ideally, if the realized community contains species that tend to be found together with this species, then one would expect that the probability of this species being a member of the local dark diversity is high, and vice versa (Lewis, Szava‐Kovats, & Pärtel, ). Vegetation databases, which are increasingly available (Bruelheide et al., ; Chytrý et al., ), could potentially be very useful to characterize these co‐occurrence patterns (Brown et al., ), but very little is known as to how they can be used under a wide range of ecological conditions, including different habitats and regions. Finally, species pool and dark diversity studies have mostly considered taxonomic diversity, but techniques are needed to address dark functional and phylogenetic diversity as well.…”