By Tracy Barbaro, Encyclopedia of Life
TraitBank is a searchable, comprehensive, open digital repository for organism traits, measurements, interactions and other facts for all taxa across the tree of life. TraitBank is integrated into the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) and leverages its existing infrastructure for names, content organization and search. Data records are aggregated from databases, literature tables, and other sources. TraitBank currently features over 3 million records related to more than 250 attributes for 384,071 taxa obtained from 35 data sources. Current data providers for moth taxa include: Global Biotic Interactions, Environments – EOL Project, Global Genome Initiative and The Paleobiology Database.
A sample of records appears on the Overview tab for each organism’s EOL page, and all records available for each organism appear on a new Data tab on each EOL taxon page. For each data record, TraitBank displays all of the related information available from the data provider, including its provenance, attribute definitions, measurement methods, and related data elements from the same set. Using the data search tool you can find and download all data TraitBank holds for each attribute of interest. You can search and filter by species values and by taxon, and can sort the results.
TraitBank records are derived from data sets that are released under an Attribution Creative Commons License or that are without any copyright restrictions. You can download data through the search interface. A read API and other ways to access the data are in development. If you use any of these data, please be sure to cite the sources. Full credits are provided in the Data tabs of EOL taxon pages and in the download files.
If you have structured data for moth traits or interactions, please contact EOL.
