GIFT – A Global Inventory of Floras and Traits for macroecology and biogeography

Abstract

Aim:To understand how functional traits and evolutionary history shape the geographic distribution of plant life on Earth, we need to integrate high-quality and global-scale distribution data with functional and phylogenetic information. Largescale distribution data for plants are, however, often restricted to either certain taxonomic groups or geographic regions. Range maps only exist for a small subset of all plant species and digitally available point-occurrence information is biased both geographically and taxonomically. Floras and checklists represent an alternative, yet rarely used potential source of information. They contain highly curated information about the species composition of a clearly defined area, and together virtually cover the entire global land surface. Here, we report on our recent efforts to mobilize this information for macroecological and biogeographical analyses in the GIFT database, the Global Inventory of Floras and Traits. Location: Global. Taxon: Land plants (Embryophyta).Methods: GIFT integrates plant distributions from regional Floras and checklists with functional traits, phylogenetic information, and region-level geographic, environmental and socio-economic data. It contains information about the floristic status (native, endemic, alien and naturalized) and takes advantage of the wealth of trait information in the regional Floras, complemented by data from global trait databases.Results: GIFT 1.0 holds species lists for 2,893 regions across the whole globe including ~315,000 taxonomically standardized species names (i.e. c. 80% of all known land plant species) and ~3 million species-by-region occurrences. Based on a hierarchical and taxonomical derivation scheme, GIFT contains information for 83 functional traits and more than 2.3 million trait-by-species combinations and achieves unprecedented coverage in categorical traits such as woodiness (~233,000 spp.) or growth form (~213,000 spp.). Main conclusions:Here, we present the structure, content and automated workflows of GIFT and a corresponding web-interface (http://gift.uni-goett ingen.de) as proof of concept for the feasibility and potential of mobilizing aggregated biodiversity data for global macroecological and biogeographical research.

Open Science principles for accelerating trait-based science across the Tree of Life

“…Opportunities exist for expanding the spatial and taxonomic coverage of trait observations, particularly by strengthening interdisciplinary connections across single organismic groups. Despite certain plant traits (for example, growth form, height and leaf size) being carefully catalogued in taxonomic species descriptions 47 , these data have only recently been exchanged with large-scale databases such as TRY 21 or BIEN (http://bien.nceas.ucsb.edu/bien/). Although several informatics challenges in biodiversity science have now been overcome (for example, synthesizing global species occurrence information (https://www.gbif.org/) and sharing genetic data on individuals (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genbank/)), trait science lacks a vision for achieving global integration across all organisms.…”

Autofertility and self‐compatibility moderately benefit island colonization of plants

“…If excluded, the association between occurrence on islands and selfing ability was weaker (i.e., less often positive). However, this more conservative dataset might be biased toward island species, because the GIFT database started with the compilation of island floras (Weigelt et al, ). Given that only a few mainland species remained in this dataset, that is, most species were island colonists, the comparison between island and mainland occurrences might have been less powerful than when all species were included.…”

“…To obtain information on the native distribution of each species with quantitative breeding‐system data on islands and mainlands, we used the Global Inventory of Floras and Traits (GIFT; Weigelt, König, & Kreft, ; http://gift.uni-goettingen.de), which to date includes regional plant species lists for 1,636 islands and 993 mainland regions globally. Depending on the plant taxonomic group, GIFT covers between 70 and 100% of the terrestrial surface of the world for native plant species.…”

Environmental heterogeneity dynamics drive plant diversity on oceanic islands

“…We obtained the information about plant diversity, as well as island characteristics (island age and area), from the Global Inventory of Floras and Traits (GIFT). The GIFT database provides information on distributions and floristic status (native, endemic, alien) of plant species based on a wide range of regional floristic databases, floras and checklists (Weigelt, König, & Kreft, 2020). The full list of original literature resources used to obtain species diversity information is available in Appendix 1.…”