Published in

Public Library of Science, PLoS ONE, 10(9), p. e108985, 2014

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0108985

Links

Tools

Export citation

Search in Google Scholar

A thesaurus for soil invertebrate trait-based approaches

Journal article published in 2014 by Benjamin Pey, Marie-Angélique Laporte, Johanne Nahmani, Apolline Auclerc, Yvan Capowiez, Gaël Caro, Daniel Cluzeau, Jérôme Cortet, Thibaud Decaens, Florence Dubs, Sophie Joimel, Muriel Guernion, Charlène Briard, Fabien Grumiaux, Baptiste Laporte and other authors.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

Full text: Download

Green circle
Preprint: archiving allowed
Upload
Green circle
Postprint: archiving allowed
Upload
Green circle
Published version: archiving allowed
Upload
Policy details
Data provided by SHERPA/RoMEO

Abstract

Soil invertebrates are known to be much involved in soil behaviour and therefore in the provision of ecosystem services. Functional trait-based approaches are methodologies which can be used to understand soil invertebrates' responses to their environment. They (i) improve the predictions and (ii) are less dependent on space and time. The way traits have been used recently has led to misunderstandings in the integration and interpretation of data. Trait semantics are especially concerned. The aim of this paper is to propose a thesaurus for soil invertebrate trait-based approaches. T-SITA, an Internet platform, is the first initiative to deal with the semantics of traits and ecological preferences for soil invertebrates. It reflects the agreement of a scientific expert community to fix semantic properties (e. g. definition) of approximately 100 traits and ecological preferences. In addition, T-SITA has been successfully linked with a fully operational database of soil invertebrate traits. Such a link enhances data integration and improves the scientific integrity of data.