Towards a thesaurus of plant characteristics: an ecological contribution

There is considerable debate about whether community ecology will ever produce general principles. We suggest here that this can be achieved but that community ecology has lost its way by focusing on pairwise species interactions independent of the environment. We assert that community ecology should return to an emphasis on four themes that are tied together by a two-step process: how the fundamental niche is governed by functional traits within the context of abiotic environmental gradients; and how the interaction between traits and fundamental niches maps onto the realized niche in the context of a biotic interaction milieu. We suggest this approach can create a more quantitative and predictive science that can more readily address issues of global change.

Ecology is a synthetic discipline benefiting from open access to data from the earth, life, and social sciences. Technological challenges exist, however, due to the dispersed and heterogeneous nature of these data. Standardization of methods and development of robust metadata can increase data access but are not sufficient. Reproducibility of analyses is also important, and executable workflows are addressing this issue by capturing data provenance. Sociological challenges, including inadequate rewards for sharing data, must also be resolved. The establishment of well-curated, federated data repositories will provide a means to preserve data while promoting attribution and acknowledgement of its use.