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Context

Structural and functional attributes of coral reef ecosystems can be informative for understanding how reefs are changing in space and in time. That is, the use of taxonomic information alone to document status & trends may miss important changes in coral reef organisation and properties related to the provision of ecosystem services.

In order to better characterise coral reef structure & function, individual monitoring programmes, research teams or investigators develop functional trait information to link with taxa identified in the field. This creates difficulties when attempting to combine data within or across regions, particularly where data are aggregated into customised functional groups.

There are a number of functional trait databases available on online that can be used to standardise data classifications from coral reef monitoring.

This wiki page introduces examples of these standardised trait databases and strategies for linking them to core data objects.

Coral Traits

One global source for reef coral trait information comes from the Coral Trait Databse. This database compiles life history trait, phylogenetic and biogeographic information for shallow-water scleractinian corals:

The information from this database can be downloaded as a *.csv to be imported using read_csv() and left_join() to an existing data objects. Depending on how the source data was collected, some concordance between the ctdb and monitoring data may be required.

Next steps

The examples for linking covariates and external data use general techniques for accessing remote data sources with the idea that users can apply these across the myriad of existing external data sources.

The exercises for this module will expose course participants to different approaches for accessing and linking with external data.

As our final training module, we will combine skills from data formatting & standardisation, visualisation and spatial representation to create a simple report