Second workshop of the sDevTrait Working Group - Hybrid meeting

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this workshop is organized in a hybrid form. This closed workshop is organized by sDiv, the Synthesis centre of the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) in Leipzig. The aim of the sDiv Working Group "sDevTrait" is to streamline development efforts in tools for ecological trait analyses. Traits related to function determine how organisms interact with environments and other species. Databases and software are developed to hold and process this wealth of data, yet interoperability is mostly lacking. We aim to provide a unified framework for existing and future tool developments, but also to streamline analytical trait pipelines. With this, reusable data will be available for large scale syntheses, which we will use to tackle key questions in trait-based ecology only answerable by unified big-data integration. The World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS), part of the LifeWatch Species Information Backbone, was invited to become part of this sDevTrait working group, and to contribute with the work they have been doing for marine species traits.