What is it about?
Plant ecologists often have to spend a lot of time manually gathering data about characteristics of plant species (called "functional traits"): these data are available on the web, but they are scattered over various data bases. This paper presents a software that was built for helping scientists in automatically retrieving these data, thus making the whole process faster and less prone to errors.
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Why is it important?
Functional traits are increasingly used by plant ecologists to answer to a wide range of research questions: the package presented here is aimed at helping scientists in making data easily available to all the scientists thus making their research activity more efficient.
Perspectives
I built the R package to fulfill my personal need of easily collecting data about plant species to perform statistical analysis on my own research data. I soon realized that the package could be of interest for other researchers thus I decided to upload it on CRAN and write a publication about its development so that it could reach a broader audience.
Dr Gionata Bocci
Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: TR8: an R package for easily retrieving plant species traits, Methods in Ecology and Evolution, February 2015, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1111/2041-210x.12327.
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