FENNEC - Functional Exploration of Natural Networks and Ecological Communities
Domain:
environment and energy
Background:
A central aspect of biodiversity research is to assess the species composition of complex natural communities and ecological networks. Beside traditional methods, nowadays, even communities that are hard to distinguish morphologically (like bacteria, pollen, or algae) can be reliably identified through DNA meta-barcoding.
Yet, for many ecological questions the ecological properties (traits) represented in a community are more informative than just the scientific names of their members.
Furthermore, other properties like threat status, invasiveness, or human usage are relevant for many studies, which can not be derived only from taxonomic names.
Despite the fact that various public databases collect such trait information, it is still a tedious manual task to enrich existing community tables with this important functional information.
Results:
Here we present the FENNEC, a web-based workbench that eases this process by mapping publicly available trait data to the user's community tables in an automated process.
Public trait information is still sparse, but what is present already helps in interpretation of community data. We applied our novel approach to a case study in pollination ecology to demonstrate the usefulness of the FENNEC and also to encourage other scientists to make trait data available in public databases.
Significance:
The FENNEC is a free web-based tool that aids in adding the layer of species traits to ecological community analyses. We already integrated various traits related to pollination ecology, which are readily usable for community analyses.
We aim to encourage scientists to participate in trait data submission to existing trait databases and to define comprehensive, reliable and informative trait data sets to be used by the FENNEC framework.