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Welcome to the bexis_traits wiki!

Decisions

There will be a list of species and taxon names -- including synonyms -- for the exploratories provided by BExIS which is used as a reference (the ontology). All uploaded data must be matched against this list. If users upload species which are not defined here, they can provide their species name in the field scientificName_user.
there will be an ordered trait list (thesaurus) for each organism group, starting with arthropods. For plants, the TOP thesaurus of plant traits is adopted (in use by TRY database). For other organisms (microbes, vertebrates), the authors should provide a thesaurus.
We provide a trait-data template with defined columns (a glossary). The columns capture the trait measurement and accuracy, information on the individual specimens where the trait data were measured, the data context, the original source for literature data, as well as the authors terms of use.
an R Script will assist to transfer a trait dataset (in matrix and table format) into a valid BExIS dataset compliant with the template. It also assists in mapping the species names and trait names to the lists provided above.
the procedure will be explained in a short manual for internal use in the exploratories.

work that has been done on standardisation of trait data so far:

Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) has developed TraitBank (http://eol.org/traitbank): http://eol.org/info/522; Parr et al. 2015 Semantic Web Journal;
They are making use of the Darwin Core Standard; Quick reference guide on GBiF; There seem to be some trait standard extensions for Darwin core, but with particular focus.
A publication about standardised measurements of invertebrate traits by Moretti et al.
On the analytical side there is an R package cati with some interesting thoughts on the grammar of trait analysis: Taudiere and Violle 2015 cati: an R package using functional traits to detect and quantify multi-level community assembly processes, Ecography
Kissling et al 2014 Establishing macroecological trait datasets: digitalization, extrapolation, and validation of diet preferences in terrestrial mammals worldwide Ecology and Evolution; 4(14):2913–2930
Park, C. A., Bello, S. M., Smith, C. L., Hu, Z.-L., Munzenmaier, D. H., Nigam, R., Smith,J. R., Shimoyama, M.,Eppig, J. T. & Reecy, J. M. (2013). The Vertebrate Trait Ontology: a controlled vocabulary for the annotation of trait data across species. Journal of Biomedical Semantics, 4(1),13. http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/2041-1480-4-13