AusTraits, a curated plant trait database for the Australian flora

Abstract

We introduce the AusTraits database - a compilation of values of plant traits for taxa in the Australian flora (hereafter AusTraits). AusTraits synthesises data on 448 traits across 28,640 taxa from field campaigns, published literature, taxonomic monographs, and individual taxon descriptions. Traits vary in scope from physiological measures of performance (e.g. photosynthetic gas exchange, water-use efficiency) to morphological attributes (e.g. leaf area, seed mass, plant height) which link to aspects of ecological variation. AusTraits contains curated and harmonised individual- and species-level measurements coupled to, where available, contextual information on site properties and experimental conditions. This article provides information on version 3.0.2 of AusTraits which contains data for 997,808 trait-by-taxon combinations. We envision AusTraits as an ongoing collaborative initiative for easily archiving and sharing trait data, which also provides a template for other national or regional initiatives globally to fill persistent gaps in trait knowledge.

Climate shapes flowering periods across plant communities

“…We also compared the difference in flowering period lengths between woody and herbaceous species using Welch's T-tests, with one t-test for all species pooled (n = 2790) and multiple t-tests with Bonferroni correction (alpha = 0.05/6 = 0.008) for species by biome (n = 87-1160). Data on woodiness were sourced from AusTraits (Falster et al, 2021). We also confirmed that species range size was positively correlated with flowering period length using OLS regressions for all available species (n = 2819) as an indication of the potential intraspecific variation in flowering phenology captured by specieslevel data.…”

“…All observations were aggregated to the species level, removing any subspecies or variants, after taxonomic alignment to the Australian Plant Census (Council of Heads of Australasian Herbaria, 2021) following methods in (Falster et al, 2021)).…”

“…We define flowering period length as the number of months in which each species has been recorded flowering, which is not necessarily equivalent to the flowering durations of populations or individuals. We combine fine-scale plant community richness and abundance data from a network of vegetation plots across Australia (TERN AusPlots (TERN, 2018)) with flowering period data from the AusTraits database (Falster et al, 2021), species descriptions and herbarium records. The Australian continent, though generally low in soil fertility, encompasses a wide array of climatic regimes from cool temperate to tropical.…”

Modelling coupled human–environment complexity for the future of the biosphere: strengths, gaps and promising directions

“…Along with existing plant-trait databases (e.g. [160,161]), other ecological datasets can be immediately applied to CHES models such as an invasive plant dataset with associated bioclimatic variables [162], a database of ecosystem services [163] as well as land use datasets that already contain human environment coupling that can further motivate future models [164][165][166].…”

Trait-dependent diversification in angiosperms: patterns, models and data

“…We encourage the integration of trait data generated from SSE studies (and others) into large, global trait databases such as eFLOWER (Sauquet et al, 2017), TRY (Kattge et al, 2020) or more focused databases (e.g. AusTraits (Falster et al, 2021)). These will act as important resources as researchers consider several traits in tandem when testing for context-dependent effects of traits, or when disentangling the traits hiding in the hidden-state approaches.…”