AEKOS Australian Vegetation sPlot Extraction

The AEKOS Australian Vegetation sPlot dataset consists of high quality, well-described plot-based data extracted from the AEKOS (portal.aekos.org.au) on 11/11/2014. The data includes vegetation records for the following datasets: Australian Ground Cover Reference Sites Database, Biological Survey of South Australia - Vegetation Survey - Biological Database of South Australia, Atlas of NSW database: VIS flora survey module, Queensland CORVEG Database, TERN AusPlots Rangelands, Transect for Environmental Monitoring and Decision Making (TREND), AusCover Supersites SLATS Star Transects, Biological Survey of the Ravensthorpe Range (Western Australia).The portal's vegetation plot data was extracted using the portal's download feature to obtain the full extent of available data for the all datasets. In addition, an average cover value was calculated for each site using a slight modification of the ingestion scripts normally used to ingest the source data into AEKOS. The altitude values derived from a map layer using the site coordinates were obtained from the AEKOS index. Finally, land use and vegetation type were derived from map layers using the site coordinates. These data were loaded in different tables of a PostgreSQL database. Subsequently, two SQL queries were built to centralise the available data in two tables: table r_site containing the site specific data and table r_speciesobservations containing the individual data on observed specimen. A PostgreSQL backup file containing these two table was then built using the pg_dump tool. The dataset can be reused for contintental-wide or global synthesis of the cover of Australian vegetation.