Collaborative Research: ABI Innovation: FuTRES, an Ontology-Based Functional Trait Resource for Paleo- and Neo-biologists

Physical characteristics of animals can help determine which ones survive and flourish, especially in a changing environment. These characteristics, also known as functional traits, include features such as length, height, shape, weight, growth rate, sex, and reproductive state. Studying these traits provides insights into how communities of different types of animals come together and how species and communities respond to changes in their environment over time, which is critical for conservation efforts.

However, very little information about functional traits is available, and what is available is difficult to combine with other data. How these traits are influenced by environmental changes - such as climate change, pollution, urbanization and human predation - and how they shift over longer timescales are poorly understood, and the need for this information is outstripping the speed with which scientists can collect these data.

Digitized collections of animals representing life from the past two million years contain a treasure trove of information about these individuals' functional traits, but these data are stored in multiple places and in different formats. Researchers may have recorded dates differently, for example, or used a variety of terms to describe a single physical feature.

Making these data widely available in standardized formats could help scientists study changes in functional traits through time, linking their observations of traits of modern animals to those from fossil and archaeological records. The Functional Trait Resource for Environmental Studies (FuTRES) project will gather trait data from digitized records; to engage communities of researchers to make these data available, standardized, and useable; and to develop a more complete workflow for using these data in research.

Functional trait data have revolutionized ecology and are transforming paleontology, but acquiring them requires extensive labor, not only in measuring traits but in managing and communicating the resulting data. When trait data are lacking, researchers substitute average values, or other characteristics like behavioral or dietary categories. These substitutes - assigned at the species level - obscure intraspecific changes in traits.

FuTRES fills the clear need for informatics tools that give researchers access to existing trait data and a place to store new data as they are generated. FuTRES is assembling a varied collection of existing trait data, building a pipeline that converts data to an integrated, semantically enriched form, and developing an Application Programming Interface (API) and web platform to serve the data.

One of the key innovations of FuTRES is the use of ontologies, an information science approach that creates computer-readable definitions of traits and describes the interrelationships of traits, organisms, collecting events, and other entities. In this way, FuTRES will make functional trait data searchable through reference to time, space, and vertebrate anatomy.

FuTRES will also provide access to trait data via popular data portals (e.g., VertNet) and software such as R, opening the data to scientists in biodiversity and other domains. The toolkit will be tested with mammalian use cases that leverage the massive scale of the unlocked data. In sum, newly created access mechanisms and tools will provide novel approaches for analyses of trait variation across space and time, providing researchers in disparate fields discovery capabilities for relevant data that would otherwise have been invisible to them.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.