ArticleNature ecology & evolution2022
Citizen science plant observations encode global trait patterns.
Article in Nature ecology & evolution, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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15 citing papers in PubMed.
- Global grassland productivity and carbon storage benefit from functional diversity under climate change.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- AI-driven technological breakthroughs and practical pathways for biodiversity conservation and ecological management.iScience · 2026Review
- Documenting biodiversity with digital data: comparing and contrasting the efficacy of specimen-based and observation-based approaches.The New phytologist · 2026Article
- Leveraging remote sensing and crowd-sourced biodiversity data for enhanced plant functional trait mapping.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Crowdsourced biodiversity monitoring fills gaps in global plant trait mapping.Nature communications · 2026Article
- iNaturalist accelerates biodiversity research.Bioscience · 2025Article
- A nature tourism and citizen science alliance.Bioscience · 2025Review
- COVERater-A Free Application for Training Researchers to Accurately Estimate Species Cover in Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecosystems.Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Global patterns of plant functional traits and their relationships to climate.Communications biology · 2024Article
- Palms are unique: clade-level pattern of the leaf-height-seed strategy scheme.Frontiers in plant science · 2024Article
- Finding the right power balance: Better study design and collaboration can reduce dependence on statistical power.PLoS biology · 2024Article
- Aliens on the Road: Surveying Wildlife Roadkill to Assess the Risk of Biological Invasion.Biology · 2023Article
- A quixotic view of spatial bias in modelling the distribution of species and their diversity.npj biodiversity · 2023Review
- Applicability of Point- and Polygon-Based Vegetation Monitoring Data to Identify Soil, Hydrological and Climatic Driving Forces of Biological Invasions-A Case Study ofPlants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Statistical power from the people.Nature ecology & evolution · 2022Article
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9 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Global maps of plant functional traits are essential for studying the dynamics of the terrestrial biosphere, yet the spatial distribution of trait measurements remains sparse. With the increasing popularity of species identification apps, citizen scientists contribute to growing vegetation data collections. The question emerges whether such opportunistic citizen science data can help map plant functional traits globally. Here we show that we can map global trait patterns by complementing vascular plant observations from the global citizen science project iNaturalist with measurements from the plant trait database TRY. We evaluate these maps using sPlotOpen, a global collection of vegetation plot data. Our results show high correlations between the iNaturalist- and sPlotOpen-based maps of up to 0.69 (r) and higher correlations than to previously published trait maps. As citizen science data collections continue to grow, we can expect them to play a significant role in further improving maps of plant functional traits.
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