Speaker
Description
sPlot (v4.0) is the most comprehensive vegetation database in the world containing more than 2.5 million plot observations and 53 million species x observation records from 138 countries. To reduce the geographical distribution bias of the previous versions towards the Global North, we actively worked to promote the integration of researchers from underrepresented areas in this new release. Beside embracing more inclusive language during the call for contribution, we adapted our membership rules to better accommodate local cooperation agreements with databases with multiple contributors. We also improved the handling of missing spatial information by manually attributing coordinates (and associated uncertainty) based on the sampling locations provided by the contributors. In comparison to the previous release, the number of plots from the Global South increased by 41% (46,538 new plots summing up to a total of 158,151 plots). More importantly, the data was contributed mainly by local investigators: the number of custodians based in the Global South more than doubled (113% increase, 26 new contributors making up a total of 49). sPlot 4.0 is also a tool for investigating vegetation change due to new time-series data: it includes 264,246 observations of resurveyed plots from which one quarter (69,624 observations) comes from outside Europe. As a result, sPlot 4.0 opens great opportunities for global vegetation research by combining the macro and local scales: extensive geographical coverage with fine-grain data and on-ground insights from local researchers.
| Status Group | Postdoctoral Researcher |
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