TRY – a global database of plant traits

By Jens Kattge, S. Díaz, S. Lavorel, I. C. Prentice, P. Leadley, G. Bönisch, Eric Garnier, M. Westoby, Peter B. Reich, I. Wright and 125 more. 2011

2,526 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Genetics, Nature and Landscape Conservation, Plant Science

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Citations in the corpus

Theory-Guided Data Science: A New Paradigm for Scientific Discovery from Data (2016, background): “Since observations about plant traits are sparsely available, such a plant trait matrix would be highly incomplete [48].”
The PREDICTS database: a global database of how local terrestrial biodiversity responds to human impacts (2014, background): “Ecology and Evolution published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. 4717 GBIF (Global Biodiversity Information Facility, http://www.gbif.org/, queried 2014-03-31), IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature, http://www.iucn.org/, queried 2014-03-31), CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endan”
Automated plant species identification—Trends and future directions (2018, background): “An alternative approach could be classifying plant characteristics (e.g., leaf shape categories, leaf position, flower symmetry) and linking them to plant character databases such as the TRY Plant Trait Database [75] for identifying a wide range of taxa.”
The Community Land Model Version 5: Description of New Features, Benchmarking, and Impact of Forcing Uncertainty (2019, methodology): “(3) Leaf longevity (leaf_long), target leaf CN ratio (leafcn), and specific leaf area (slatop) were all derived from the mean PFT‐specific values identified in the TRY database (Kattge et al., 2011).”
Review of optical-based remote sensing for plant trait mapping (2013, background): “plant height, photosynthesis rate, nitrogen content or leaf phenology, respectively, which are being increasingly used in ecology research (Cornelissen et al., 2003; Kattge et al., 2011).”
Monitoring biodiversity change through effective global coordination (2017, background): “plants [44]) do not provide within species temporal variation of traits.”
A trait-based approach to ocean ecology (2018, background): “Inspired by terrestrial plant ecologists that have established a community effort to produce an impressive trait data base for plants—TRY—(Kattge et al., 2011), marine ecologists are only now beginning to compile such databases for selected groups of organisms, e.”