MOSAIC: A Unified Trait Database to Complement Structured Population Models

Abstract

The ecological sciences have joined the big data revolution. However, despite exponential growth in data availability, broader interoperability amongst datasets is still needed to unlock the potential of open access. The interface of demography and functional traits is well-positioned to benefit from said interoperability. Trait-based ecological approaches have been criticised because of their inability to predict fitness components, the core of demography; likewise, demographic approaches are data-hungry, and so using traits as ecological shortcuts to understanding and forecasting population viability could offer great value. Here, we introduce MOSAIC, an open-access trait database that unlocks the demographic potential stored in the COMADRE, COMPADRE, and PADRINO open-access databases. MOSAIC data have been digitised and curated through a combination of existing datasets and additional taxonomic and/or trait records sourced from primary literature. In its first release, MOSAIC (v. 1.0.0) includes 14 trait fields for 300 animal and plant species: biomass, height, growth determination, regeneration, sexual dimorphism, mating system, hermaphrodism, sequential hermaphrodism, dispersal capacity, type of dispersal, mode of dispersal, dispersal classes, volancy, and aquatic habitat dependency. MOSAIC also includes species-level phylogenies for 1,359 species and population-specific climate data where locations are recorded. Using MOSAIC, we highlight a taxonomic mismatch of widely used trait databases with existing structured population models. Despite millions of trait records available in open-access databases, taxonomic overlap between open-access demographic and trait databases is <5%. We identify where traits of interest to ecologists can benefit from database integration and start to quantify traits that are poorly quantified (e.g., growth determination, modularity). The MOSAIC database evidences the importance of improving interoperability in open-access efforts in ecology as well as the need for complementary digitisation to fill targeted taxonomic gaps. In addition, MOSAIC highlights emerging challenges associated with the disparity between locations where different trait records are sourced.

More social species live longer, have higher generation times, and longer reproductive windows

“…As such, to explore the relationships between sociality and life history traits beyond the blurring effect of body mass, I first obtained adult body mass data for each species. For mammals, I used information archived in (69); for birds, AVONET (70); for fish, FishBase (71) via rFishBase (72); for mammals, birds, and reptiles and amphibians, AMNIOTE (73); and for remaining groups, MOSAIC (74), and data from (54). For 18 remaining species for which, adult body mass data were not available from these online databases (mostly insects, bivalves, and corals), I obtained body mass information from peer-review publications using the keywords “body mass” OR “weight” and the name of the species in ISI WoS.…”

DEBBIES to compare life history strategies across ectotherms

“…Workflow of parameterising a DEB-IPM and example applications, including what databases DEBBIES can feed into (Essential Biodiversity Variables 12 ; MOSAIC 10 ). DEBBIES currently contains 185 ectotherms of 18 different orders.…”

Fisher & Salguero-Gomez reproductive death final with tables

“…It is also possible that a mechanism of costly male competition has evolved in plants and the apparent lack of male-only semelparity in the Plant Kingdom is due to our sparse knowledge of plant diversity (Allen 2003), especially regarding the sex-specific demographic performance of plants (but see Petry et al 2016, Römer et al 2022. However the majority of the Plant Kingdom is characterised by reproductive arrangements other than dioecy, and hermaphroditism and other sexual arrangements are common (Bernard et al 2022). Perhaps because annuals risk reproductive failure in their only reproductive episode if pollination fails, most annual plants are monoecious and capable of self-fertilization, and dioecy is more common in iteroparous than in semelparous plants (Friedman 2020).…”