Assessing biodiversity status and trends in plant communities is critical for understanding, quantifying and predicting the effects of global change on ecosystems. Vegetation plots record the occurrence or abundance of all plant species co-occurring within delimited local areas. This allows species absences to be inferred, information seldom provided by existing global plant datasets. Although many vegetation plots have been recorded, most are not available to the global research community. A recent initiative, called ‘sPlot’, compiled the first global vegetation plot database, and continues to grow and curate it. The sPlot database, however, is extremely unbalanced spatially and environmentally, and is not open-access. Here, we address both these issues by (a) resampling the vegetation plots using several environmental variables as sampling strata and (b) securing permission from data holders of 105 local-to-regional datasets to openly release data. We thus present sPlotOpen, the largest open-access dataset of vegetation plots ever released. sPlotOpen can be used to explore global diversity at the plant community level, as ground truth data in remote sensing applications, or as a baseline for biodiversity monitoring.

中文翻译：

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sPlotOpen – 环境平衡、开放获取的全球植被图数据集

评估植物群落的生物多样性状况和趋势对于理解、量化和预测全球变化对生态系统的影响至关重要。植被图记录了在划定的局部区域内共同出现的所有植物物种的出现或丰度。这允许推断物种缺失，现有全球植物数据集很少提供信息。尽管已经记录了许多植被地块，但全球研究界无法获得大多数植被地块。最近的一项名为“sPlot”的计划汇编了第一个全球植被图数据库，并继续发展和管理它。然而，sPlot 数据库在空间和环境上极不平衡，并且不是开放访问的。这里，我们通过 (a) 使用几个环境变量作为采样层重新采样植被图来解决这两个问题，以及 (b) 获得 105 个本地到区域数据集的数据持有者的许可，以公开发布数据。因此，我们展示了 sPlotOpen，这是有史以来发布的最大的植被图开放访问数据集。sPlotOpen 可用于探索植物群落层面的全球多样性，作为遥感应用中的地面实况数据，或作为生物多样性监测的基线。