The first global database of the Earth's vegetation

The study, led by the University Martin Luther Halle - Wittenberg (MLU) and the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig counts on the participation of a hundred researchers from 97 universities and research centers. Among them are Josep Peñuelas, scientist at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and the Centre for Research on Ecology and Forestry Applications (CREAF), and Aaron Pérez Haase, researcher at the University of Barcelona, at the associated Center for Advanced Studies of Blanes (CEAB-CSIC).

The study presents the first database of global vegetation, which contains over 1.1 million complete lists of plant records for all ecosystems. The database could help researchers make better predictions of the consequences of global climate change.

Currently, around 390,000 plant species are known. Over the years, each species has developed different traits to adapt to their environment. These traits include the size of the plant, its thickness and its leavesʼ chemical compounds. These traits are also known as the functional traits of the plant. So far, scientists had done research on the different combinations of these functional traits from the perspective of individual species. However, they also needed databases on vegetation with information about all the plants that grow in a specific place.

Until now, there was not a unified database to gather and harmonize this series of data. This is why the “sPlot” initiative was launched for the Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv), which aimed to develop the first database on global vegetation, unifying and merging the existing data.

sPlot has now over 1.1 lists of vegetation from all continents, collected over the last decades by hundreds of international researchers. The study has shown, for instance, how much global factors influence functional traits of plant communities. They found that, contrary to the current opinion, temperature and precipitations play a relatively limited role.

However, researchers found a tight link between climate variables and phosphorus administration in leaves, reflected in the proportion between the content of nitrogen and phosphorous in the leaf, which is an indicators for the nutritional state of plants.

The local use of soils and the interaction of different plants in a specific place have a larger impact on the functional traits of plant communities. These findings show that future calculations of plant production in Spain cannot be determined on the basis of simple models of temperature-precipitation. The study is the first one of a series of studies in the sPlot consortium.

Since scientists who wish so can ask for it, the sPlot database is a unique opportunity to work on many biodiversity issues at a global scale, including topics related to the distribution of non-native plant species, and the similarities and differences of plant communities in world regions.

Reference article:

Helge Bruelheide et al. "Global trait-environment relationships of plant communities", Nature Ecology & Evolution, November 2018. Doi: 10.1038/s41559-018-0699-8