Open Science

TRY plant trait database - enhanced coverage and open access

Plant traits—the morphological, anatomical, physiological, biochemical and phenological characteristics of plants—determine how plants respond to environmental factors, affect other trophic levels, and influence ecosystem properties and their benefits and detriments to people. Plant trait data thus represent the basis for a vast area of research spanning from evolutionary biology, community and functional ecology, to biodiversity conservation, ecosystem and landscape management, restoration, biogeography and earth system modelling. Since its foundation in 2007, the TRY database of plant traits...

Marine invertebrates metabolism

Developing statistical tools to understand the metabolic rates of marine invertebrates.

Networks in nature

Exploring methods and patterns of ecological networks.

Do low oxygen environments facilitate marine invasions? Relative tolerance of native and invasive species to low oxygen conditions

Biological invasions are one of the biggest threats to global biodiversity. Marine artificial structures are proliferating worldwide and provide a haven for marine invasive species. Such structures disrupt local hydrodynamics, which can lead to the formation of oxygen-depleted microsites...

Estimating monotonic rates from biological data using local linear regression

Accessing many fundamental questions in biology begins with empirical estimation of simple monotonic rates of underlying biological processes. Across a variety of disciplines, ranging from physiology to biogeochemistry, these rates are routinely estimated from non-linear and noisy time series data using linear regression and ad hoc manual truncation of non-linearities...

Nestedness across biological scales

Biological networks pervade nature. They describe systems throughout all levels of biological organization, from molecules regulating metabolism to species interactions that shape ecosystem dynamics. The network thinking revealed recurrent organizational patterns in complex biological systems, such as the formation of semi-independent groups of connected elements (modularity) and non-random distributions of interactions among elements...

BAAD: a Biomass and Allometry Database for woody plants

Understanding how plants are constructed–i.e., how key size dimensions and the amount of mass invested in different tissues varies among individuals–is essential for modeling plant growth, carbon stocks, and energy fluxes in the terrestrial biosphere. Allocation patterns can differ through ontogeny, but also among coexisting species and among species adapted to different environments...