LEIPZIG, Germany, July 1 (UPI) -- The world's largest database on plant traits has been published, covering 69,000 of the world's 300,000 plant species, European researchers say.

The database of traits -- plants' functional properties that determine how they compete for resources such as light, water and soil nutrients, and where and how fast they can grow -- will be an essential tool for biodiversity research and Earth-system sciences, the researchers said.


The database is the result of collaboration among 106 research institutions in Europe, South America and Australia, an article in the journal Global Change Biology reported.

"After four years of intensive development, we are proud to present the first release of the global database," Jens Kattge, senior scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Germany, said.

The database should help eliminate a major bottleneck to modeling the effects of climate change at ecosystem and whole-earth scales caused by a lack of trait data for sufficiently large numbers of species, researchers said.

"This huge advance in data availability will lead to more reliable predictions of how vegetation boundaries and ecosystem properties will shift under future climate and land-use change scenarios," Ian Wright from Australia's Macquarie University said.