BEKKER R.M.1 and KNEVEL I.C.2

1 Community and Conservation Ecology Group (formerly Lab. of Plant Ecology), University of Groningen, P.O. Box 14, NL-9750AAHaren, NL. 2 Landscape Ecology Group (FB7), Carl von Ossietzky University, P.O. Box 2503, D-26111, Oldenburg, Germany.
E-mail: R.M.Bekker@biol.rug.nl

To date there has been considerable effort to build up databases to synthesise information on plant traits. The knowledge of plant traits is currently growing fast, but the sources are scattered over many countries, in several different languages, and collected and stored in different ways. This severely impedes the functional analysis of plant species-environment relations and the prediction of plant biodiversity after changes in land-use in Europe or regions within Europe.

Recently the life-history data-base project "LEDA" was started within the fifth framework programme of the EC. The LEDA Traitbase project aims to provide an open Europe-wide database of plant traits relevant to the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity in changing European landscapes. It will focus on plant traits that describe three key features of plant dynamics; persistence, regeneration and dispersability. The data-base will be built using several sources of knowledge including the collation of existing databases, extensive literature compilations, unpublished data from the participants and other colleagues, and additional measurements.

The major challenges in LEDA Traitbase project are to predict plant biodiversity in a changing landscape and to pool transnational expertise on the functional significance of traits, their classification and measurement. This will be realised through a species-trait matrix for over 20 different traits with referenced information under the control of an editorial board. Also the LEDA Traitbase will be tested with case studies on assessment, restoration and conservation of biodiversity on various ecological scales (national, regional, and local) in different European countries. The focus of the project will be on the Northwest European flora and the LEDA Traitbase will be available on the world-wideweb. The LEDA Traitbase can be utilised as a tool in planning, nature conservation and vegetation restoration, and in applied research for land use managers, environmental agencies, policy makers and researchers. A user-friendly interface to the WWW-based database will be available including an intelligent data mining technique and advanced data retrieval techniques to aggregate extracted data. E-networking will be established to encourage the user community to continuously update and add to the database during and after the project.