TRY – a global database of plant traits

Abstract

Plant traits – the morphological, anatomical, physiological, biochemical and phenological characteristics of plants and their organs – determine how primary producers respond to environmental factors, affect other trophic levels, influence ecosystem processes and services and provide a link from species richness to ecosystem functional diversity. Trait data thus represent the raw material for a wide range of research from evolutionary biology, community and functional ecology to biogeography. Here we present the global database initiative named TRY, which has united a wide range of the plant trait research community worldwide and gained an unprecedented buy-in of trait data: so far 93 trait databases have been contributed. The data repository currently contains almost three million trait entries for 69 000 out of the world's 300 000 plant species, with a focus on 52 groups of traits characterizing the vegetative and regeneration stages of the plant life cycle, including growth, dispersal, establishment and persistence. A first data analysis shows that most plant traits are approximately log-normally distributed, with widely differing ranges of variation across traits. Most trait variation is between species (interspecific), but significant intraspecific variation is also documented, up to 40% of the overall variation. Plant functional types (PFTs), as commonly used in vegetation models, capture a substantial fraction of the observed variation – but for several traits most variation occurs within PFTs, up to 75% of the overall variation. In the context of vegetation models these traits would better be represented by state variables rather than fixed parameter values. The improved availability of plant trait data in the unified global database is expected to support a paradigm shift from species to trait-based ecology, offer new opportunities for synthetic plant trait research and enable a more realistic and empirically grounded representation of terrestrial vegetation in Earth system models.

Functional traits in agriculture: agrobiodiversity and ecosystem services

“…For instance, if important traits are constant within species, it could be possible to build trait databases for species and then predict ecosystem services by knowing which species are present, using previously recorded trait data (Box 2). To meet similar data needs in the broader field of ecology, advances have been facilitated by large-scale, coordinated collection and aggregation of trait data [69][70][71][72]. Ecologists working in agroecosystems should also establish a universally accessible agricultural trait database for all species in agroecosystems, across taxa, farm management, and environmental conditions.…”

Improving plant functional groups for dynamic models of biodiversity: at the crossroads between functional and community ecology

“…Previous studies have highlighted the need to move from life form based classification to emergent group classification based on functional traits (Epstein et al, 2001, Harrison et al, 2010, Jeltsch et al, 2008, Kattge et al, 2011. Here, we propose a framework to include the minimum set of relevant traits with which PFG can represent the overall plant diversity (including herbaceous ecosystems), and can be used in dynamic models of vegetation at regional scale.…”

“…They consequently offer the possibility to model the spatial and temporal dynamics of biodiversity patterns at regional scale that no approach can currently provide. The main limitation to including more species and improving trait selection remains data availability, although considerable efforts have been made to compile global plant trait databases (Kattge et al, 2011).…”

Groundwater-dependent ecosystems: recent insights from satellite and field-based studies

“…Despite the large number of traits and species across the seven sites, the standard error of the ecosystem-scale average for each data point was remarkably small, indicating significant convergence in normalised responses to differences in depth-togroundwater. Convergence of functional variations in traits across sites and species is increasingly observed with respect to rainfall or other climatic variables (Wright et al, 2004;Kattge et al, 2011). Indeed, identification of plant functional types (PFTs) is a practical means for models of land surfaceatmosphere interactions across biomes to integrate the physiology of vegetation.…”