This presentation was given by Jens Kattge, on the occasion of the DIVERSITAS Celebration on 30 September 2014 in Seville, Spain. Jens Kattge is group leader of the Functional Biogeography research group at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, Germany. DIVERSITAS is in an international research programme on biodiversity science. Founded in 1991, DIVERSITAS will transition to Future Earth in 2014. Find out more at bit.ly/1sZ2GcB

1. TRY –
a global database of
plant traits
Jens Kattge, Sandra Diaz, Sandra Lavorel, Paul Leadley,
Colin Prentice, Gerhard Bönisch, Christian Wirth
and all members of the TRY initiative

2. 2007
Fast Track Initiative on Refining Plant
Functional Classifications
Sandra Díaz
Sandra Lavorel
Colin Prentice
Paul Leadley
Christian Wirth
Gerhard Bönisch
Jens Kattge
Goal: A global database of plant traits to make the data available for
trait-based approaches in ecology and vegetation modeling

3. TRY – a global database of plant traits
Second generation of data pooling
Glopnet
BiolFlor
Fang
LEDA
KewGardens
CEDAR-CREEK
CORDOBASE
DIVERSUS
FET
VISTA
WoodDensity
BIOPOP
Craine
Ordonez
Enquist
Moles
Reich
Shipley
Garnier
Zanne
Cornelissen
ZLTP
Leishman
ECOCRAFT
RAINFOR
ECOQUA
SID
BROT
Díaz
Wright
Penuelas
TRY
Chapin
250 datasets
1,097 traits
99,989 species
5.6 mio trait records

4. TRY – a global research network
12067 measurement sites
178 contributing institutes

5. 450
400
350
300
250
200
150
100
50
0
TRY has gained momentum
Datasets contributed
Data requests
Datasets released
Publications
Kattge et al. 2011
93 datasets,
2.8 mio records
Feb-07 Feb-08 Feb-09 Feb-10 Feb-11 Feb-12 Feb-13 Feb-14 Feb-15

6. www.try-db.org