29  AusTraits, Australia’s Plant Trait Database

AusTraits, Australia’s largest plant trait database was the first trait database to be build using the traits.build workflow.

29.1 AusTraits data records

As of October, 2023, AusTraits has:

  • 370+ datasets 

  • 250+ contributors 

  • 1,800,000+ data records 

  • 500+ traits 

  • 30,000 Australian plant taxa 

29.2 Accessing AusTraits data

There are multiple ways to access and manipulate AusTraits data.

  • Download the dataset from Zenodo

  • Source AusTraits using the austraits R package

  • Clone the austraits.build GitHub repository and build AusTraits from the current develop branch (not easily reproducible)

Download database with austraits.R package

First install and source the package: 

install.packages("remotes")  # if it isn't already installed on your machine

remotes::install_github("traitecoevo/austraits", dependencies = TRUE, upgrade = "ask")

library(austraits)

Before loading AusTraits, see what versions are available,

austraits::get_versions()
# A tibble: 5 × 4
  publication_date doi                     version id      
  <date>           <chr>                   <chr>   <chr>   
1 2023-11-19       10.5281/zenodo.10156222 5.0.0   10156222
2 2023-09-18       10.5281/zenodo.8353840  4.2.0   8353840 
3 2023-01-30       10.5281/zenodo.7583087  4.1.0   7583087 
4 2022-11-27       10.5281/zenodo.7368074  4.0.0   7368074 
5 2021-07-14       10.5281/zenodo.5112001  3.0.2   5112001

Download the most recently released version:

most_recent_doi <- austraits::get_versions()|> dplyr::pull("doi") |> dplyr::first()

most_recent_doi

austraits <- austraits::load_austraits(doi = most_recent) # you can load from the Zenodo doi

austraits <- austraits::load_austraits(version = "5.0.0") # you can load from the version
                                                          # the `path` argument stores a copy for future use.