ABI Development: An Open-Access Global Repository of Plant and Animal Demographic Data

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This project will create a comprehensive, open-access database of plant and animal demographic information that will be useful to researchers, educators, and conservation managers. No such centralized repository currently exists, although biologists have been collecting data on the rates with which individuals survive, grow, and reproduce for many decades, and from tens of thousands of populations around the world. These fundamental biological data can inform a range of scientific research within and outside of the field of biology, including understanding why certain populations go extinct or become invasive, and predicting how species may respond to anthropogenic pressures and global change. By developing a single, standardized platform for storing and analyzing these demographic data, this project will yield an important resource for a range of users. For example, researchers will be able to directly contribute their datasets into the repository, as well as to link these demographic data with other databases (e.g. on species distributions, genetic sequences, climate projections) to conduct large-scale comparative studies. Teachers and students will be able to explore variations in life cycles and carry out basic analyses by following the exercises and tutorials that will accompany the database. Finally, managers of threatened species can use these demographic data to better understand the needs of their populations and compare the impacts of different management strategies (e.g., increasing breeding compared to increasing offspring survival). The demographic rates of survival, growth, and reproduction are the basic units for measuring how populations change in size and structure through time and space. As such, these demographic data serve as key resources for a range of biological research, from understanding the evolution of life histories to predicting species responses to global change. Moreover, demographic studies tend to follow a standardized protocol for data collection and presentation in the form of matrix population models (MPMs). This standardization provides a rare opportunity to conduct large-scale comparative analyses across the tree of life. The scientific literature currently contains MPMs for 1,500 plant species and 2,000 animal species worldwide, often with several populations for each species. The distinctive data structure and standardized analyses for MPMs necessitate a uniform, centralized repository to maximize the utility of these valuable data. This project aims to develop an open-access repository of MPMs, which will allow researchers to leverage decades of demographic monitoring to conduct comparative analyses at global, regional, and local scales. The proposed work involves developing a robust relational database management system for MPMs, building upon existing efforts by an international team of demographic experts and data users on the COMPADRE Plant Matrix Database and COMADRE Animal Matrix Database. The team will create a publicly accessible interface to facilitate data usage and enable researchers to directly contribute their MPM datasets through a standardized data entry portal. Additionally, the project's senior personnel will develop tutorials and teaching materials, and conduct a series of workshops to engage current and potential users of the repository including researchers, educators, and conservation managers. The results of this project can be found at http://www.compadre-db.org/.