AusTraits: a curated plant trait database for the Australian flora

INTRODUCTION

AusTraits is a transformative database, containing measurements on the traits of Australia’s plant species, standardised from hundreds of disconnected primary sources. So far, data have been assembled from 264 distinct sources, describing 375 plant traits and 29230 taxa. A full list of sources is provided below.

To handle the harmonising of diverse data sources, we use a reproducible workflow to implement the various changes required for each source to reformat it suitable for incorporation in AusTraits. Such changes include restructuring datasets, renaming variables, changing variable units, changing taxon names. While this repository contains the harmonised data, the raw data and code used to build the resource will also be made available,

CONTRIBUTORS

The project is jointly led by Dr Daniel Falster (University of New South Wales, Sydney) and Dr Rachael Gallagher (Macquarie University), with input from 291 contributors from over 125 institutions.

The following people and institutions have have contributed to building this resource.

Data contributors (individuals): Mark Adams, Collin W. Ahrens, Matthew Alfonzetti, Sophia Amini, Tara Angevin, Julian Ash, Owen Atkin, Tony Auld, Andrew Baker, Anthony Bean, Chris Blackman, Keith Bloomfield, Tara Boreham, David Bowman, Jason Bragg, Willi A. Brand, Amber Briggs, John Brock, Tim Brodribb, Genevieve Buckton, Don Bulter, Geoff Burrows, Elizabeth Caldwell, James Camac, Raymond Carpenter, Jane A. Catford, Gregory Cawthray, Lucas Cernusak, Gregory Chandler, Alex Chapman, David Cheal, Alex Cheesman, Si-Chong Chen, Robert Chinnock, Brendan Choat, Peter Clarke, Derek Clayton, Steven Clemants, Harold Trevor Clifford, Brook Clinton, Peta Clode, Michelle Cochrane, Helen Coleman, Bronwyn Collins, Alessandro Conti, Wendy Cooper, William Cooper, William Cornwell, Meredith Cosgrove, Ian Cowie, Lyn Craven, Michael Crisp, Erika Cross, Kristine Crous, Saul Cunningham, Ellen Curtis, Ian Davidson, Matthew Daws, Jane L. DeGabriel, Matthew Denton, Ning Dong, Honglang Duan, David Duncan, Richard P. Duncan, Marco Duretto, John M. Dwyer, Derek Eamus, Cheryl Edwards, Judy Egan, Manuel Esperon-Rodriguez, John Evans, Susan Everingham, Chris Fahey, Daniel Falster, Jennifer Firn, Carlos Fonseca, Paul Irwin Forster, John Foster, Ben French, Tony French, Allison Frith, Doug Frood, Anne Fuchs, Jennifer Funk, Rachael Gallagher, Ronald Gardiner, Sonya Geange, Oula Ghannoum, Sean Gleason, Ethel Goble-Garratt, Carl Gosper, Emma Gray, Philip K Groom, Caroline Gross, Peter Grubb, Greg Guerin, Chris Guinane, Lydia Guja, Amy Hahs, TJ Hall, Monique Hallet, Matthew Tom Harrison, Tammy Haslehurst, Foteini Hassiotou, Patrick Hayes, Martin Henery, John Herbohn, Dieter Hochuli, Peter Hocking, Jocelyn Howell, Jing Hu, Guomin Huang, Lesley Hughes, Kate Hughes, John Huisman, Jugo Ilic, Muhammad Islam, Ashika Jagdish, Daniel Jin, Gregory Jordan, Enrique Jurado, Sabine Kasel, Ian Kealley, Greg Keighery, Jürgen Kellermann, James Kirkpatrick, Kirsten Knox, Michele Kohout, Robert Kooyman, Martyna Kotowska, Luka Kovac, Kaely Kreger, John Kuo, Hoa Ran Lai, Etienne Laliberte, Hans Lambers, Martin Lambert, Byron Lamont, Dana Lanceman, Robert Lanfear, Frank van Langevelde, Daniel C. Laughlin, Bree-Anne Laugier-Kitchener, Michael Lawes, Claire Laws, James Lawson, Emma Laxton, Caroline Lehmann, Andrea Leigh, Michelle Leishman, Tanja Lenz, Brendan Lepschi, James Lewis, Felix Lim, Liz Lindsay, Udayangani Liu, Daniel Montoya Londono, Janice Lord, Christiane Ludwig, Ian Lunt, Christopher Lusk, Catriona Macinnis-Ng, Mary Maconochie, Hannah MacPherson, Anthony Manea, Karen Marais, Bruce Maslin, Riah Mason, Margaret Mayfield, Richard Mazanec, James McCarthy, Kate McClenahan, Elissa McFarlane, Jacob McOverton, Trevor Meers, Marlien van der Merwe, Daniel Metcalfe, Per Milberg, Karel Mokany, Angela Moles, Ben D. Moore, Nicholas Moore, John Morgan, Huw Morgan, William Morris, Annette Muir, Samantha Munroe, Peter Myerscough, Des Nelson, Dominic Neyland, Aine Nicholson, Dean Nicolle, Adrienne Nicotra, Ule Niinemets, Tom North, Andrew O’Reilly-Nugent, Odhran S. O’Sullivan, Brad Oberle, Mike Olsen, Yusuke Onoda, Mark Ooi, Colin P. Osborne, Grazyna Paczkowska, Paula Peeters, Burak Pekin, Caio Guilherme Pereira, George Perry, Aaron Phillips, Catherine Pickering, Melinda Pickup, Loren Pollitt, Laura Pollock, Rob Polmear, Pieter Poot, Jeff R. Powell, Sally A. Power, Iain Colin Prentice, Aina Price, Lynda Prior, Suzanne Prober, Thomas Pyne, R.J.Williams, Jennifer Read, Victoria Reynolds, Barbara Rice, Anna Richards, Ben Richardson, Jessica L. Rigg, Bryan Roberts, Michael Roderick, Julieta A. Rosell, Maurizio Rossetto, Barbara Rye, Paul D. Rymer, Miguel de Salas, Anna Salomaa, Michael Sams, Gordon Sanson, Susanne Schmidt, Ernst-Detlef Schulze, Waltraud Schulze, Inge Schulze, Andrew John Scott, Kerrie Sendall, Alison Shapcott, Luke Shoo, Steven Sinclair, Anne Sjostrom, Renee Smith, Benjamin Smith, Santiago Soliveres, Fiona Soper, Ben Sparrow, Amanda Spooner, Rachel Standish, Timothy Staples, George Stewart, Jan Suda, Catherine Tait, Guy Taseski, Daniel Taylor, Freya Thomas, Ian Thompson, David Tissue, Mark G. Tjoelker, Yue Phin David Jeremiah-Seok Tng, Hellmut R. Toelken, Kyle Tomlinson, Malcolm Trudgen, Neil C. Turner, Erik Veneklaas, Susanna Venn, Peter Vesk, Carolyn Vlasveld, Maria Vorontsova, Charles Warren, Lasantha K. Weerasinghe, W.E Westman, Mark Westoby, Matthew White, Erica Williams, Nick Williams, Kathryn Willis, Jarrah Wills, J. Bastow Wilson, Peter Wilson, Ian Wright, Colin Yates, Jian Yen, Amy Zanne, Kasia Zieminska

Data contributors (institutions): Australian National Botanic Garden, Brisbane Rainforest Action and Information Network, Kew Botanic Gardens, National Herbarium of NSW, Northern Territory Herbarium, Queensland Herbarium, Western Australian Herbarium, South Australian Herbarium, State Herbarium of South Australia, Tasmanian Herbarium

Data processing: Daniel Falster, Elizabeth Wenk, Caitlan Baxter, Sam Andrew, James Lawson, Stuart Allen

Project initiation and data compilation: Rachael Gallagher, Ian Wright

Funding: This work was supported by fellowship grants from Australian Research Council to Falster (FT160100113), Gallagher (DE170100208) and Wright (FT100100910), a grant from Macquarie University to Gallagher, and investment from the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC), via their "Transformative data collections" (https://doi.org/10.47486/TD044) program. The ARDC is enabled by National Collaborative Research Investment Strategy (NCRIS).

ACCESSING AND USE OF DATA

The compiled AusTraits database is released under an open source licence (CC-BY), enabling re-use by the community. A requirement of use is that users cite the AusTraits resource paper, which includes all contributors as co-authors:

Falster, Gallagher et al (2021) AusTraits, a curated plant trait database for the Australian flora. Scientific Data (in press)

OR

Falster, Gallagher et al (2021) AusTraits: a curated plant trait database for the Australian flora. bioRxiv 2021.01.04.425314,  http://doi.org/10.1101/2021.01.04.425314

In addition, we encourage users you to cite the original data sources, wherever possible. 

Note that under the license data may be redistributed, provided the attribution is maintained. 

ONTRIBUTING

We envision AusTraits as an on-going collaborative community resource that:

1. Increases our collective understanding the Australian flora; and
2. Facilitates accumulating and sharing of trait data;
3. Builds a sense of community among contributors and users; and
4. Aspires to fully transparent and reproducible research of highest standard.

As a community resource, we are very keen for people to contribute. Here are some of the ways you can contribute:

Reporting Errors: If you notice a possible error in AusTraits, please post an issue on GitHub .

Refining documentation: We welcome additions and edits that make using the existing data or adding new data easier for the community.

Contributing new data: We gladly accept new data contributions to AusTraits. For full instructions on preparing data for inclusion in AusTraits, please got to https://github.com/traitecoevo/austraits.build.

STRUCTURE OF AUSTRAITS DATA

The compiled AusTraits database has the following main components:

austraits
├── traits
├── sites
├── contexts
├── methods
├── excluded_data
├── taxanomic_updates
├── taxa
├── definitions
├── contributors
├── sources
└── build_info

These elements include all the data and contextual information submitted with each contributed datasets.

Full details on each of these components and columns therein are contained within the document Austraits_dictionary.html and within the file definitions.yml.

Full details on all original sources used to generate this compilation and variables collected are available within the download.