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Project Summary
One of the major challenges is to predict plant biodiversity in a
changing landscape. For this purpose information whether plants can
persist and regenerate in their existing habitats and/or can
colonise new habitats is needed. Both abilities depend on their
biological traits, i.e. vegetative expansion and multiplication,
reproduction, seed bank longevity, and dispersability.
To date there has been considerable effort to build up databases to
synthesise information on plant traits. The knowledge of plant
traits is currently growing fast but is scattered over many sources,
in several different languages, collected and stored in different
ways and mutually not integrated. This severely impedes the
functional analysis of plant species-environment relations and the
prediction of plant biodiversity after changes in land use in Europe
or regions within Europe.
The LEDA Traitbase provides an open Europe-wide database of plant
traits relevant for the conservation and sustainable use of
biodiversity in changing European landscapes, to be used as a tool
in planning, in nature conservation and restoration, and in applied
research.
The Traitbase is based on the Northwest European flora and focuses
on plant traits that describe three key features of plant dynamics:
persistence, regeneration and dispersability. The species-trait
matrix of the LEDA Traitbase is being filled using several sources
of knowledge, including the collation of existing databases,
extensive literature compilations, and additional measurements.
The operating system consists of a user-friendly interface to the
WWW-based LEDA Traitbase including an intelligent data mining
technique to establish trade-off structures in trait combinations on
which to base functional types, and advanced data retrieval
techniques to aggregate extracted data. E-networking has been
established to encourage the user community to continuously update
and add to the database.
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