History
AusTraits grew from a small compilation of Australian plant traits into recognised national research infrastructure. This page traces that development in reverse chronological order — the phases of the project, the funding that enabled each step, and the tools, papers, and recognition along the way.
2024–present · National integration and wider access
Backed by the ARDC Planet Research Data Commons, the project set out to cover Australia’s complete flora and opened new pathways for people to access the data directly.
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2026
A web-based data portal
Development of the AusTraits data portal opens up browser-based access to the database, lowering the barrier for users who don't work in R.
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2026
A species-averages layer
A dedicated working group began developing a species-averages layer — consensus trait values per species — to make AusTraits easier to join with other species-level datasets.
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2026
Pollination traits working group
A dedicated meeting and working group convened to extend AusTraits into pollination traits, broadening the resource toward plant–animal interactions.
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2025
Complete coverage for national vegetation mapping
A new collaboration with the Australian Government's Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (DCCEEW) set out to reach near-complete coverage of plant height and leaf size — traits needed to build national vegetation information systems.
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2025
A second national software award
Elizabeth Wenk received the Ecological Society of Australia's New Developers of Open Source Software in Ecology award, sponsored by the ARDC, for the APCalign R package — the second time an AusTraits team member has won this award.
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2024
AusTraits Floras Workshop
The team convened the AusTraits Floras Workshop at the Botanic Gardens of Sydney (December 2024), bringing together delegates from all major Australian herbaria to align on delivering harmonised trait data through national flora portals.
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2024
ARDC Planet Research Data Commons
A new grant under the ARDC's Planet Research Data Commons — “AusTraits: a national database on the traits of Australia's complete flora” (~$300,000) — funded the push toward continental coverage of the entire ~30,000-species flora.
2023–2024 · Standards and a reusable engine
The tools built for AusTraits were generalised into a reusable framework, paired with a formal trait vocabulary and taxonomic alignment, and documented in a suite of method papers — as the ARDC increasingly framed AusTraits as a national data asset.
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2024
The methods behind the resource, published
Three papers documented the engine and standards underpinning AusTraits: the
traits.builddata model and workflow (Ecological Informatics), the APCalign taxonomic-alignment package (Australian Journal of Botany), and the AusTraits Plant Dictionary (Scientific Data). -
2023
A reusable framework, dictionary, and taxonomy tool
The team released
traits.build— the data model and pipeline generalised from AusTraits so other communities can build harmonised databases — alongside the AusTraits Plant Dictionary (a formal, openly published vocabulary of trait concepts) and APCalign for aligning names to the Australian Plant Census. -
2023
Recognised as national infrastructure
The ARDC's 2023 Impact Booklet profiled AusTraits' role in Australia's Black Summer bushfire recovery, with CEO Rosie Hicks describing it as an “internationally recognised gold-standard database” and a curated national data asset. An ARDC media release (June 2023) featured AusTraits-linked research on global knowledge inequality in ecology.
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2023
Mining the floras
A published workflow for extracting traits from textual taxonomic descriptions (Ecological Informatics) let the team scrape state and national eFloras, adding trait data at continental scale.
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2023
ARDC Community Connect
An ARDC Community Connect grant (~$50,000) supported continued curation and community engagement around the resource, including the traits.build book documenting the data model and workflow.
2021–2023 · The resource paper and first tools
AusTraits was formally published and widely cited, proved its value in the national bushfire response, and gained its first dedicated software.
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2022
First national software award
Fonti Kar received the Ecological Society of Australia's New Developers of Open Source Software in Ecology award, sponsored by the ARDC, for the austraits R package.
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2022
The austraits R package
The austraits package gave researchers a consistent way to access, filter, summarise, and visualise the database directly in R.
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2021
The AusTraits resource paper
The data descriptor “AusTraits, a curated plant trait database for the Australian flora” was published in Scientific Data with hundreds of contributing authors, and remains the primary citation for the resource.
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2021
Informing bushfire recovery
Harmonised fire-response data from AusTraits underpinned the national response to the 2019–20 Black Summer bushfires, helping the Threatened Species Scientific Committee prioritise plant species for recovery (Gallagher et al. 2021).
2019–2020 · Becoming national infrastructure
Investment from the Australian Research Data Commons transformed AusTraits from a research-group compilation into funded national infrastructure — while a new partnership with the Botanic Gardens of Sydney broadened its traits and audience beyond ecology.
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2020
ARDC Data Partnerships
A major ARDC Data Partnerships grant (DP720, ~$525,000, 10.47486/DP720) brought together more than 30 contributors and funded a substantial expansion of the database and its curation.
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2019–20
Partnering with the Botanic Gardens of Sydney
A new partnership with Hervé Sauquet and the Botanic Gardens of Sydney broadened AusTraits beyond ecology — expanding the range of traits it captured (including morphological and reproductive characters) and widening its audience across systematics, taxonomy, and botanical collections.
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2020
A vision for open trait science
The team co-led “Open science principles for accelerating trait-based science across the tree of life” (Nature Ecology & Evolution), articulating the open-data philosophy behind AusTraits and the Open Traits Network.
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2019
First ARDC investment
An ARDC Transformative Data Collections investment (TD044, ~$50,000, 10.47486/TD044) — “AusTraits: a curated plant trait database for the Australian flora” — marked the first dedicated infrastructure funding and the start of an ongoing ARDC partnership.
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2019
Delivering evolving data
The datastorr workflow was developed to deliver successive versions of the growing database directly into R — an early piece of the reproducible release cycle later formalised in Zenodo DOIs.
2017–2019 · A project manager and a pipeline
With Daniel Falster’s ARC Future Fellowship providing capacity, Elizabeth Wenk joined to lead the project day to day, and she and Falster began building the data-assembly pipeline that would later become traits.build and APCalign.
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2017–19
Building the AusTraits pipeline
Daniel Falster and Elizabeth Wenk began developing the data-assembly pipeline — reconciling taxonomy, variable names, units, and provenance across hundreds of sources — that would later be generalised into the
traits.buildworkflow and the APCalign taxonomy tool. -
2017
Elizabeth Wenk joins as project manager
Elizabeth (Lizzy) Wenk became the project's lead manager, coordinating data curation, harmonisation, and contributor relationships — a role at the centre of AusTraits ever since.
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2017
Future Fellowship capacity
Daniel Falster's ARC Future Fellowship (FT160100113, “Niche 2.0”, awarded 2016 and active from 2017) provided the research capacity to develop the workflow and tools that would become AusTraits.
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2017
Building the case for shared trait data
A National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility round table on collaborative trait research and data (convened by Rachael Gallagher and Daniel Falster) helped build the community and rationale for a national, harmonised trait resource.
2015–2016 · Origins at Macquarie University
AusTraits began as a research initiative at Macquarie University, supported by ARC fellowships to its founders and by a shared conviction that Australian plant trait data should be open, harmonised, and reusable.
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2015–16
AusTraits initiated
AusTraits was initiated by Rachel Gallagher and Ian Wright at Macquarie University — the first steps toward compiling and harmonising trait data for the Australian flora. The early work was supported by ARC fellowship grants to Gallagher (DE170100208) and Wright (FT100100910), alongside Macquarie University.