Irma Knevel
L
ife-history traits of the Northwest European flora; a database
Currently I am participating as a post-doc within the European plant database project LEDA. Part of my work takes place within the COCON group (researcher) and part at the Landscape Ecology group in
Oldenburg
,
Germany
(administrative project co-ordinator). The LEDA Traitbase project is a response of an international group of scientists to the problem of changing land use, pollution, eutrophication, fragmentation and dereliction of traditional landscapes within
Europe
. The project aims to provide an database of plant traits (or characteristics) relevant to the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity in changing European landscapes. The major challenge of the project is to be able to predict plant biodiversity in a changing landscape. To do this we need to know if plants can persist, regenerate and disperse in their existing habitats and/or can colonise new habitats. These abilities depend on their biological traits, i.e. seed bank longevity, seed characteristics, plant growth parameters, and dispersability.
The goal is that at
the end of the project (November 2005) the species-trait matrix of the Traitbase will be filled with reliable information for over 20 traits for 3000 selected Northwest European plant species. The operating system of LEDA is a user-friendly interface to the WWW-based LEDA Traitbase, including an intelligent data mining technique to establish trade-off structures in trait space on which to base functional types, and advanced data retrieval techniques to aggregate extracted data.
