PLoS ONE (Jan 2014)

A thesaurus for soil invertebrate trait-based approaches.

  • Benjamin Pey,
  • Marie-Angélique Laporte,
  • Johanne Nahmani,
  • Apolline Auclerc,
  • Yvan Capowiez,
  • Gaël Caro,
  • Daniel Cluzeau,
  • Jérôme Cortet,
  • Thibaud Decaëns,
  • Florence Dubs,
  • Sophie Joimel,
  • Muriel Guernion,
  • Charlène Briard,
  • Fabien Grumiaux,
  • Baptiste Laporte,
  • Alain Pasquet,
  • Céline Pelosi,
  • Céline Pernin,
  • Jean-François Ponge,
  • Sandrine Salmon,
  • Lucia Santorufo,
  • Mickaël Hedde

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0108985
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 9, no. 10
p. e108985

Abstract

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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.