New 'plant dictionary' realised after global research collaboration
If you need to look up a fact about a plant's functional properties, then a new plant database developed by an international team of biologists should be your first port of call. The TRY database is the fruit of collaboration between 106 research institutions from all over the world, and this veritable 'plant dictionary' brings together 3 million traits for 69,000 of the world's 300,000 plant species. The aim of the new tool, published in its first version in the journal Global Change Biology, is to provide an indispensible data source for biodiversity research and earth sciences. 'This huge advance in data availability will lead to more reliable predictions of how vegetation boundaries and ecosystem properties will shift under future climate and land-use change scenarios,' comments Dr Ian Wright from Macquarie University, Australia, one of the joint coordinators of the project. 'The TRY global database also promises to revolutionise biodiversity research, leading to a new understanding of how not only the numbers of species (biodiversity) but also the variation among species in their traits (functional diversity) together [affect] ecosystem functions and services.' Plant traits, the morphological and physiological properties of plants, determine how they compete for resources such as light, water, and soil nutrients, and also where and how fast they can grow. Plant traits also affect the influence plants have on ecosystem properties such as rates of nutrient cycling, water use and carbon dioxide uptake. Collating plant trait data in one place will also have a positive impact on research into the effects of climate change at ecosystem and whole-earth scales, which has until now been held back by lack of access to trait data for a sufficiently large numbers of species. The TRY database, which was four years in the making, aims to fill this research gap. 'Global vegetation models commonly classify plant species into a small number of plant functional types, such as grasses or evergreen trees, but these do not capture most of the observed variation in plant traits,' says Christian Wirth, Professor for Plant Ecology at the University of Leipzig in Germany, another coordinating institution of the project. The TRY database shows for the first time on such a scale that most of the observed trait variation is represented by differences among plant species. In contrast, plant functional types, such as used in global vegetation models, contribute much lesser to the trait variations: for several traits this is as little as 25?%. Using trait-based vegetation models leads to a more realistic and empirically grounded representation of terrestrial biodiversity in Earth system models. Prof. Sandra Díaz from IMBIV-CONICET research institute in Argentina comments on the innovative nature of the database: 'The scale of the challenges we are facing demands new ways of doing science, both in terms of the size of the networks and databases, and the high degree of collaboration.' The TRY database is hosted is at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena, Germany.For more information, please visit:Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry:http://www.bgc-jena.mpg.de/
Countries
Argentina, Australia, Germany