TRY - a global database of plant traits

Kattge, J. et al.

31 páginas, 8 figuras, 5 tablas.

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.

We would like to thank the subject editor, the publisher for caution and patience, two anonymous reviewers for supportive comments. The TRY initiative and database is hosted, developed and maintained at the Max-Planck-Institute for Biogeochemistry (MPI-BGC) in Jena, Germany. TRY is or has been supported by DIVERSITAS, IGBP, the Global Land Project, the UK Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) through its programme QUEST (Quantifying and Understanding the Earth System), the French Foundation for Biodiversity Research (FRB), and GIS ‘Climat, Environnement et Societe´’ France. We wish to thank John Dickie and Kenwin Liu for making the data from the KEW Seed Information Database available in the context of the TRY initiative, Alastair Fitter, Henry Ford and Helen Peat for making the Ecological Flora of the British Isles available, and Andy Gillison for the VegClass database. We wish to thank Brad Boyle and the SALVIAS project for building and making available a global checklist of plant species names, and GBIF (Andrea Hahn) for making the species occurrence data available. The authors thank the NSF LTER program DEB 0620652 and the NSF LTREB program DEB 0716587 for making data on plant traits available.

Peer reviewed