Environmental change, such as climate warming, biological invasion, local and global extinction, land use and land cover change, elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide, and much more, can have a variety of impacts on species, communities, and ecosystems. Accurately forecasting such impacts requires detailed information on species' traits. "Traits" refers to the characteristics of plant, animal, and microbial species that influence ecosystem processes such as body size, metabolic rate, stoichiometry, and much more. Information on species' traits and the number of studies that use them are growing at an exponential rate. TraitNet will facilitate this dramatic increase in trait-based evolutionary and ecological research by fostering collaboration among researchers and coordinating the collection, sharing, and archiving of species trait data. Currently, traits are used across a broad spectrum of disciplines, including niche theory, community assembly, metabolic ecological theory, phylogenetics, conservation, and ecological stoichiometry, but each discipline has developed its own operational definitions, protocols, and databases with little coordination. TraitNet will advance this research by coordinating trait-based research across disciplines via an integrated program of electronic collaborations, workshops, training seminars, and electronic and journal publication and will develop a universal trait database prototype entitled TraitBank. TraitNet's five primary goals are (1) address core hypotheses in trait-based research, (2) identify critical data gaps, (3) coordinate the standardization of collection and storage of trait data, (4) assemble a database to address core hypotheses, and (5) facilitate the development of cross-disciplinary computational tools for merging, disseminating, and sharing trait data. TraitNet's website will be widely accessible to the scientific community and the public, while protecting the intellectual property rights of individual investigators. TraitNet will further diversity in science by maintaining a strong gender balance, including under-represented groups, and balancing participants among students, postdoctoral scientists, and senior and junior researchers. This coordination by TraitNet will substantially minimize redundant collection efforts, maximize scientific productivity, and stretch taxpayer dollars.
"TraitNet - Coordinating trait-based ecological and evolutionary Research," began with a mission to advance and integrate trait-based evolutionary and ecological research. Its five primary goals were (1) identify core hypotheses in trait-based research, (2) identify critical data gaps, (3) coordinate the standardization of collection and curation of trait data, (4) assemble a database to address core hypotheses, and (5) facilitate the development of cross-disciplinary computational tools for merging, disseminating, and sharing trait data. TraitNet tackled these goals by establishing an international researcher network, running a series of workshops and training seminars at annual scientific meetings and electronic and journal publications. TraitNet began with very ambitious and lofty goals. Our aim was to convince our colleagues in ecology that by investing in informatics we could change the way ecologists manage and share data. Our mission was two-fold. First we needed to convince our colleagues to share data. Second we needed to convince our colleagues to invest in informatics technologies that would facilitate data sharing. An informatics approach requires not only substantial financial investment, but also a substantial investment of time. It requires that researchers agree on data standards, and agree to mark up their data according to those standards. In the end, we partially succeeded in convincing our colleagues that data sharing is essential in moving our field forward, as the largest ecological questions require data that none of us can collect on our own. However we failed to convince our colleagues that an informatics approach is worth such a substantial investment of their time and effort. Instead, the ecological research community has coalesced around a closely related project, the TRY initiative. In contrast to the open source and open data approach that TraitNet proposed, the TRY initiative has utilized standard relational database technology and gatekeepers that manually manage data inputs and data sharing requests. While TraitNet and TRY share the same ultimate goals of data sharing, TraitNet aimed to foster that data sharing with a more sophisticated, long-term informatics approach, whereas TRY utilized a short-term stopgap approach. Because this short-term approach delivered quickly, the TRY initiative has gained substantial momentum. Our conclusion is that the ecological community is content with the approach and services that TRY is providing, and that we are not yet ready for a strong informatics approach to data curation and sharing. Nonetheless, substantial ecological and evolutionary research is being achieved through the TRY initiative.
