Abstract
Background Assessment of species composition in ecological communities and networks is an important aspect of biodiversity research. Yet, for many ecological questions the ecological properties (traits) of organisms in a community are more informative than their scientific names. Furthermore, other properties like threat status, invasiveness, or human usage are relevant for many studies, but they can not be directly evaluated from taxonomic names alone. Despite the fact that various public databases collect such trait information, it is still a tedious manual task to enrich existing community tables with those traits, especially for large data sets. For example, nowadays, meta-barcoding or automatic image processing approaches are designed for high-throughput analyses, yielding thousands of taxa for hundreds of samples in very short time frames.
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. We applied our novel approach to a case study in pollination ecology to demonstrate the usefulness of the Fennec. The range of topics covered by the case study includes specialization, invasiveness, vulnerability, and agricultural relevance.
Significance The Fennec is a free web-based tool that simplifies the inclusion of known species traits in ecological community analyses. We encourage scientists to participate in trait data submission to existing trait databases and to use the Fennec for their analysis. A public instance containing various traits related to pollination ecology is available at http://fennec.molecular.eco.
