Collaborative Research: ABI Innovation: FuTRES, an Ontology-Based Functional Trait Resource for Paleo- and Neo-biologists

动物的身体特征可以帮助确定哪些动物能够生存和繁衍，特别是在不断变化的环境中。这些特征，也称为功能性状，包括长度，高度，形状，重量，生长速度，性别和生殖状态等特征。研究这些特征可以深入了解不同类型动物的群落如何聚集在一起，以及物种和群落如何随着时间的推移对环境的变化做出反应，这对保护工作至关重要。然而，关于功能性状的信息非常少，而且现有的信息很难与其他数据联合收割机结合起来。这些特征如何受到环境变化的影响-例如气候变化，污染，城市化和人类捕食-以及它们如何在较长的时间尺度上转变，人们对这些信息的需求远远超过了科学家收集这些数据的速度。代表过去200万年生命的动物数字化集合包含了关于这些个体功能特征的信息宝库，但这些数据存储在多个地方，格式不同。例如，研究人员可能会以不同的方式记录日期，或者使用各种术语来描述单一的物理特征。以标准化的格式广泛提供这些数据可以帮助科学家研究功能特征随时间的变化，将他们对现代动物特征的观察与化石和考古记录联系起来。环境研究功能性状资源（FuTRES）项目将从数字化记录中收集性状数据;让研究人员社区参与，使这些数据可用，标准化和可用;并开发一个更完整的工作流程，在研究中使用这些数据。功能性状数据已经彻底改变了生态学，并正在改变古生物学，但获得它们需要大量的劳动，不仅在测量性状，而且在管理和交流所产生的数据。当缺乏特征数据时，研究人员会用平均值或其他特征（如行为或饮食类别）代替。这些替代品-在物种水平上分配-掩盖了种内性状的变化。FuTRES填补了信息学工具的明确需求，使研究人员能够访问现有的性状数据，并在生成新数据时存储新数据。FuTRES正在收集各种现有的特质数据，建立一个管道，将数据转换为集成的，语义丰富的形式，并开发一个应用程序编程接口（API）和网络平台，以服务于数据。FuTRES的关键创新之一是使用本体论，这是一种信息科学方法，可以创建计算机可读的性状定义，并描述性状，生物体，收集事件和其他实体的相互关系。通过这种方式，FuTRES将通过参考时间，空间和脊椎动物解剖学使功能性状数据可搜索。 FuTRES还将通过流行的数据门户（例如，VertNet）和R等软件，向生物多样性和其他领域的科学家开放数据。该工具包将使用利用大规模解锁数据的哺乳动物用例进行测试。 总之，新创建的访问机制和工具将为跨空间和时间的性状变异分析提供新的方法，为不同领域的研究人员提供发现相关数据的能力，否则他们将无法看到。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Physical characteristics of animals can help determine which ones survive and flourish, especially in a changing environment. These characteristics, also known as functional traits, include features such as length, height, shape, weight, growth rate, sex, and reproductive state. Studying these traits provides insights into how communities of different types of animals come together and how species and communities respond to changes in their environment over time, which is critical for conservation efforts. However, very little information about functional traits is available, and what is available is difficult to combine with other data. How these traits are influenced by environmental changes - such as climate change, pollution, urbanization and human predation - and how they shift over longer timescales are poorly understood, and the need for this information is outstripping the speed with which scientists can collect these data. Digitized collections of animals representing life from the past two million years contain a treasure trove of information about these individuals' functional traits, but these data are stored in multiple places and in different formats. Researchers may have recorded dates differently, for example, or used a variety of terms to describe a single physical feature. Making these data widely available in standardized formats could help scientists study changes in functional traits through time, linking their observations of traits of modern animals to those from fossil and archaeological records. The Functional Trait Resource for Environmental Studies (FuTRES) project will gather trait data from digitized records; to engage communities of researchers to make these data available, standardized, and useable; and to develop a more complete workflow for using these data in research. Functional trait data have revolutionized ecology and are transforming paleontology, but acquiring them requires extensive labor, not only in measuring traits but in managing and communicating the resulting data. When trait data are lacking, researchers substitute average values, or other characteristics like behavioral or dietary categories. These substitutes - assigned at the species level - obscure intraspecific changes in traits. FuTRES fills the clear need for informatics tools that give researchers access to existing trait data and a place to store new data as they are generated. FuTRES is assembling a varied collection of existing trait data, building a pipeline that converts data to an integrated, semantically enriched form, and developing an Application Programming Interface (API) and web platform to serve the data. One of the key innovations of FuTRES is the use of ontologies, an information science approach that creates computer-readable definitions of traits and describes the interrelationships of traits, organisms, collecting events, and other entities. In this way, FuTRES will make functional trait data searchable through reference to time, space, and vertebrate anatomy. FuTRES will also provide access to trait data via popular data portals (e.g., VertNet) and software such as R, opening the data to scientists in biodiversity and other domains. The toolkit will be tested with mammalian use cases that leverage the massive scale of the unlocked data. In sum, newly created access mechanisms and tools will provide novel approaches for analyses of trait variation across space and time, providing researchers in disparate fields discovery capabilities for relevant data that would otherwise have been invisible to them.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.