Harmonizing marine zooplankton trait data toward a mechanistic understanding of ecosystem functioning

Abstract

AbstractCompiling trait information promotes discovery and innovation in using trait‐based approaches in ecology. Various zooplankton trait datasets are stored in unlinked data repositories, in diverse data structures, and have varying levels of complexity. These require standardization and harmonization to allow interoperability and to limit the duplication of efforts in the time‐consuming and error‐prone task of trait compilation. This study aggregated and harmonized 33 zooplankton traits datasets and supplemented these with more than 150 references into a single zooplankton trait database with an initial set of 56 traits for 3535 marine zooplankton species. The database has a long data table structure using the entity‐attribute‐value format and includes taxonomic and ancillary metadata, and data source provenance preserving how the data were originally recorded. The database is stored both at the individual level (Level 1) and as species level means (Level 2). The Level 1 database has 57,615 rows of trait records and the Level 2 database has 14,977 unique trait‐taxon records. We evaluated the coverage of trait data, taxonomic representation, and strategies in filling‐in data gaps. Comparison of trait value estimation approaches identified allometric scaling to be more accurate than taxon‐level generalization and imputation. This centralized and harmonized marine zooplankton trait database aims to be extendable and future‐proof and to promote trait data sharing, FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable) data practices, and reproducibility.