BryForTrait – A life‐history trait database of forest bryophytes

The way in which different environmental factors influence the development of plant assemblages is still one of the most important questions in ecological research (Sutherland et al., 2013; Verheyen et al., 2017). Over the past decades, plant functional trait analyses have been widely applied to understand to what extent the interspecific variation in trait attributes has an adaptive value or to predict ecosystem processes (Díaz & Cabido, 2001). These approaches are based on the assumption that plants with similar ecologically relevant trait attributes respond to environmental changes in comparable ways (McIntyre, Lavorel, & Tremont, 1995). Functional trait studies have been widely applied to vascular plants, a development which was driven by the setting up of large trait database projects on regional (e.g. LEDA – Kleyer et al., 2008) and on global (TRY – Kattge et al., 2011) scale. However, in contrast to trait studies on vascular plants, studies using bryophytes are scarce (Cornelissen, Lang, Soudzilovskaia, & During, 2007; Palisaar & Poschlod, 2001; Thorn et al., 2016). This is often due to missing trait information; up to now only a few trait collections for bryophytes exist (e.g. BRYOATT for the UK – Hill, Preston, Bosanquet, & Roy, 2007). This low data availability is surprising as bryophytes are a key component in many ecosystems of the world, ranging from very cold to very warm and from very dry to very wet (Cornelissen et al., 2007). There are manifold roles of bryophyte contributions to ecosystem functioning; we want to highlight that they substantially contribute to aboveground productive biomass (e.g. Wolf, 1993), provide major soil N inputs (e.g. Solheim, Endal, & Vigstad, 1996), carbon sinks (Yu, 2012) or control soil and vegetation hydrology and temperature (e.g. Beringer, Lynch, Chapin, Mack, & Bonan, 2001). With the BryForTrait database, we want to reduce the data limitation in trait availability for forest ecosystems. Especially in humid forest ecosystems of Europe, where the vegetation is often dominated by bryophytes (in cover and diversity), thus, these represent a very important component in ecosystem functioning (Cornelissen et al., 2007). The BryForTrait database primarily focuses on Germany, but we assume that the database is useful for other European countries as well. Received: 25 January 2018 | Accepted: 19 April 2018 DOI: 10.1111/jvs.12646