PAnnonian DAtabase of Plant Traits

 

In the last decades, several international databases have been established in which the most important measurable plant traits have been collected, mostly to meet the needs of research projects. The LEDA (Kleyer et al. 2008) database is a collection of vegetative, generative and dispersal-related plant traits; the CLO-PLA (Klimešová & de Bello 2009) database collects traits related to vegetative growth and dispersal; the GLOPNET (Wright et al. 2004) database contains data related to the physical, chemical and structural properties of leaves; the Seed Information Database is a collection of seed traits; while the BIOPOP (Poschlod et al. 2003) and BiolFLOR (Kühn et al. 2004) databases contain the life-history traits of plant species. The database of databases, the TRY (Kattge et al. 2020) incorporates several trait databases. Although data on a considerable number of plant traits can easily be found in these databases, the fact that they incorporate data from several different sources, different countries and from under different climatic conditions is a serious drawback. Climate, and local abiotic conditions in general, have a considerable effect on the trait values of plants, which means that the applicability of such databases can be limited. Moreover, these databases mostly focus on the flora of Western and North-Western Europe and species with a more continental distribution, which are highly represented in the Pannonian flora, are almost completely missing from these databases, further limiting their usefulness for Hungarian studies. These problems have launched the creation of a Hungarian plant trait database that focuses on the Pannonian flora.

PADAPT incorporates both previously published plant trait data from Hungary and new measurements of plants collected in the Pannonian region. Its aim is to collect data about as many easily measurable plant traits as possible and to make these data accessible to everybody in order to facilitate trait-based studies of the Pannonian flora and vegetation.

PADAPT will not only contain traits in the narrow sense (e.g., plant height, seed mass and leaf area) but also information on the species’ life form, ecological strategy and indicator values. Although a considerable amount of the necessary trait data can be found in the published literature, establishing the database is still a huge amount of work. Fortunately, several Hungarian research groups can assist this work. Besides colleagues at the Department of Ecology and Department of Botany at the University of Debrecen, researchers of the MTA-DE Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services Research Group, the ÖK Danube Research Institute and the Institute of Ecology and Botany, the University of Sopron, the Department of Ecology at the University of Szeged, the Botanical Garden of the University of Debrecen, the Eötvös Lóránd University, and the Szent István University are also participating in the project.

Funding: NKFIH KH 130320, KH 129483, K119225
Project period: 2019-2022

Final version for PADAPT 1.0 is available at: https://padapt.eu/en