Global Inventory of Floras and Traits

GIFT is an initiative to create a database of regional plant checklists with complete global coverage for large-scale biogeographical and macroecological analyses based on plant species identities and regional species composition (Weigelt et al. 2020). To this end, GIFT includes regional plant species lists based on published and unpublished floras and checklists as well as online databases. At the level of individual plant species, GIFT contains functional traits as well as taxonomic and phylogenetic information. At the level of geographic regions, it additionally contains information on physical geographic, bioclimatic and socio-economic characteristics.

GIFT workflow

Regional Floras

For each geographic region, GIFT contains one or more species lists of a particular taxonomic group (e.g. vascular plants, angiosperms, or a plant family). The main focus of GIFT lies on species native to a given geographic region (e.g. islands, administrative units, protected areas). We therefore include information on the floristic status of the species (e.g. native, naturalized, endemic) if available in the literature resource. Data on naturalized alien species collected in the scope of GIFT is included in the Global Naturalized Alien Flora (GloNAF), a complementary initiative to map the global distribution of alien plant species naturalized outside their native ranges (van Kleunen et al. 2015).

The database started out as a global collection of island floras. It therefore offers a very comprehensive overview over the floristic composition of 2,282 of the world's islands. The collection of mainland floras is work in progress with up to now 1,345 mainland regions covered aiming at complete global coverage and increasingly high regional resolution. Please use the map interface to see for which combinations of geographic region, taxonomic group and floristic status species checklists are available.

Taxonomy and Phylogenies

Gift covers species from all major groups of land plants (Embryophyta). The main focus for the collection of species lists and traits, however, is vascular plants (Tracheophyta) and in particular angiosperms (Angiospermae). All species names enter the database in their original form including infraspecific name information and author names. In order to make species identities comparable across regions, species names are submitted to a semi-automated taxonomic standardization and validation procedure, since GIFT version 3.0 based on taxonomic information provided by the World Checklist of Vascular Plants (Goevarts et al. 2021) and iPlant’s Taxonomic Name Resolution Service. Genus names that do not occur in the World Checklist of Vascular Plants are corrected manually. Species counts per region, floristic status and taxonomic group presented on this website are based on the standardized species names and do not include infraspecific taxa.

All species are linked to a taxonomic backbone based on the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group (APG) IV system making it possible to extract regional species lists for certain taxonomic groups. In addition all angiosperm species are linked to phylogenies (e.g. Smith & Brown 2018) for phylogeographical analyses.

Plant Functional Traits

GIFT currently contains information on 109 functional traits covering important features related to plant morphology, life history, reproduction, physiology, and ecology. Each trait is defined either by a set of specified categorical values or a unit of measurement. Original trait information from floras, field measurements, or databases are manually standardized according to this scheme and imported into GIFT. We then apply a hierarchical derivation procedure that fills data gaps using available information in other traits (König et al. 2019). For example, woodiness status can be derived from growth form, growth form can usually be derived from life form, etc. Derived trait values are only retained when the concerned species does not have any original information for the respective trait. To eventually obtain a single, standardized value per trait and species, original and derived trait values are automatically aggregated based on the agreement of resources (for categorical variables) or the mean, minimum or maximum value of the original values (for numerical variables). Throughout the entire procedure, information can be traced back to their original reference and unstandardized value.

Environmental Characteristics

For each geographic region a suite of 217 physical geographic, bioclimatic and socio-economic characteristics is computed based on the spatial polygons assigned to the region and additional GIS resources. This includes (1) characteristics based on the regions’ polygon itself like its area, centroid coordinates and extent, (2) summary statistics derived from raster layers like digital elevation models, climate surfaces (e.g. CHELSA, Karger et al. 2017) or population density, and (3) miscellaneous metrics calculated from additional polygon resources like biogeographic region affinity or island isolation (Weigelt & Kreft 2013).

References

Govaerts, R., Nic Lughadha, E., Black, N., Turner, R. & Paton, A. (2021) The World Checklist of Vascular Plants, a continuously updated resource for exploring global plant diversity. Scientific Data, 8, 215. doi: 10.1038/s41597-021-00997-6

Karger, D.N., Conrad, O., Böhner, J., Kawohl, T., Kreft, H., Soria-Auza, R.W., Zimmermann, N.E., Linder, H.P. & Kessler, M. (2017) Climatologies at high resolution for the earth’s land surface areas. Scientific Data, 4, 170122. doi: 10.1038/sdata.2017.122

König, C., Weigelt, P., Schrader, J., Taylor, A., Kattge, J. & Kreft, H. (2019) Biodiversity data integration--The significance of data resolution and domain. PLOS Biology, 17, e3000183. doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3000183

Smith, S.A. & Brown, J.W. (2018) Constructing a broadly inclusive seed plant phylogeny. American Journal of Botany, 105, 302-314. doi: 10.1002/ajb2.1019

van Kleunen, M., Dawson, W., Essl, F., Pergl, J., Winter, M., Weber, E., Kreft, H., Weigelt, P., Kartesz, J., Nishino, M., Antonova, L.A., Barcelona, J.F., Cabezas, F.J., Cardenas, D., Cardenas-Toro, J., Castano, N., Chacon, E., Chatelain, C., Ebel, A.L., Figueiredo, E., Fuentes, N., Groom, Q.J., Henderson, L., Inderjit, Kupriyanov, A., Masciadri, S., Meerman, J., Morozova, O., Moser, D., Nickrent, D.L., Patzelt, A., Pelser, P.B., Baptiste, M.P., Poopath, M., Schulze, M., Seebens, H., Shu, W.S., Thomas, J., Velayos, M., Wieringa, J.J. & Pysek, P. (2015) Global exchange and accumulation of non-native plants. Nature, 525, 100-103. doi: 10.1038/nature14910

Weigelt, P. & Kreft, H. (2013) Quantifying island isolation – insights from global patterns of insular plant species richness. Ecography, 36, 417-429. doi: 10.1111/j.1600-0587.2012.07669.x

Weigelt, P., König, C. & Kreft, H. (2020) GIFT – A Global Inventory of Floras and Traits for macroecology and biogeography. Journal of Biogeography, 47, 16-43. doi: 10.1111/jbi.13623

Core team

Patrick Weigelt
Patrick Weigelt

... is a senior scientist at the Biodiversity, Macroecology & Biogeography group at the University of Göttingen. He is interested in macroecological patterns of the world's island floras and the biogeography and macroecology of plants in general. In the scope of his PhD, he started the collection of island floras to move forward from a purely species richness focused to a more species composition based island macroecology with a focus on functional and phylogenetic biodiversity patterns.

Pierre Denelle
Pierre Denelle

... is a PostDoc at the Biodiversity, Macroecology & Biogeography group and develops the GIFT-R-package. His research focuses on functional biogeographical patterns of plants in specific environments such as deserts and mountains. More generally, he works on community assembly and plant biogeography.

Holger Kreft
Holger Kreft

... is the head of the Department of Biodiversity, Macroecology & Biogeography. He is interested in biogeographical and ecological patterns from local to global scales, particularly gradients of species richness and endemism. His research interests include plant and vertebrate diversity, island and conservation biogeography, and tropical ecology.

Associate members

Julian Schrader
Amanda Taylor

Former members

Christian König
Christian König

... did his PhD in the Biodiversity, Macroecology & Biogeography group and during that time led the collection of mainland floras and functional traits in GIFT and helped developing the technical infrastructure of the database. His research interests include large-scale biogeographical patterns, global change ecology, ecological modeling and biodiversity informatics.


Collaborations

GloNAF

GloNAF (Global Nturalized Alien Flora) is a living database project about alien plant species and became a synonym for many related projects dealing with all kinds of scientific and policy relevant questions and studies about alien species (also other taxa) and related data.


TRY

Try is a network of vegetation scientists headed by Future Earth and the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemestry, providing a global archive of curated plant traits.


MOL

Map of Life endeavors to provide 'best possible' species range information and species lists for any geographic area.


iDiv

iDiv is a DFG research centre based in Halle, Jena and Leipzig, where researchers from 30 nations establish the scientific basis for the sustainable management of our planet's biodiversity.


Publications based on GIFT

Checklist resources

Trait resources

Data availability

Access

GIFT data is available via the GIFT R-package. Tutorials of how to yúse it can be found here.

A few data contributors of GIFT asked to restrict access to their data for now. These data can be accessed through the R-package specifying a password-protected API (provided upon request) and their use requires contacting the owners of the data and asking for permission to use them. Please contact us at gift[at]uni-goettingen.de if help is needed regarding the use of GIFT data.

Citation

Publications using the GIFT database should cite all primary references as well as the version of GIFT and the original publication of the GIFT database (Weigelt et al., 2020). All primary references in GIFT are available using the GIFT_references() function. If GIFT data are retrieved through the R-package, the package and its accompanying publication (Denelle et al., 2023) should also be cited.

References

Weigelt, P., König, C. & Kreft, H. (2020) GIFT – A Global Inventory of Floras and Traits for macroecology and biogeography. Journal of Biogeography, 47, 16-43. doi: 10.1111/jbi.13623

Denelle, P., Weigelt, P. & Kreft, H. (2023) GIFT - an R package to access the Global Inventory of Floras and Traits. Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 14, 2738-2748. doi: 10.1111/2041-210x.14213

Versions: current version GIFT 3.1

11 November 2023: GIFT version 3.1

New checklist data for Mongolia and Farasan Archipelago and correction of seed traits for Hawaii (ref 16; units).

30 June 2023: Release of GIFT version 3.0

GIFT version 3.0 includes new data and updated workflows as described in:

Denelle, P., Weigelt, P. & Kreft, H. (2023) GIFT - an R package to access the Global Inventory of Floras and Traits. Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 14, 2738-2748. doi: 10.1111/2041-210x.14213

Updated workflows include:

(1) New taxonomic name standardization based on WCVP.

(2) More statistics on species level trait aggregation.

(3) Updated extraction of raster layer values per GIFT region and new raster resources.

(4) Updated phylogeny

30 May 2022: GIFT version 2.2

New checklists (with a focus on endemic species) and traits for various oceanic archipelagos (Cook Islands, Madeira, Arctic Islands, Cayman Islands, Comores, Juan Fernandez, Palau, Galapagos, Frisian Islands, Antilles, Japan, Mayotte, Fiji, Taiwan, etc.) and various mainland regions (Equatorial Guinea and the entire former USSR in sub-regions).

21 May 2021: GIFT version 2.1

New checklists and traits included for the Americas, Crimea, Madagascar, Arabian peninsula, Laos, Bhutan, India, China, Sunda-Sahul shelf, Tonga, Canary Islands, West Africa and for ferns and palms globally. Large categorical trait data included from Try.

01 September 2019: Release of GIFT version 2.0

New checklist and trait data included for Europe, the Mediterranean, temperate Asia, Panama, Japan, Java, New Zealand, Easter Island and the Torres Strait Islands:

535,000 new species-by-region occurrences and 85,000 new trait records!

Updated workflows to document biases in the distribution of trait data:

(1) trait records based only on referencesthat potentially introduce biases due to covering only specific groups of species (e.g. all trees, climbers, epiphytes, etc.) or taxa (e.g. all gymnosperms, orchids, etc.).

(2) trait records based on logical imputation that potentially introduces biases (e.g. deriving growth form from life cycle in the case of annuals [-> herbs], but not perennials [-> no clear imputation possible]).

Updated taxonomic trait derivation:

(1) GIFT now includes negative trait records at higher taxonomic level, i.e. taxon x never exhibits value y in trait z.

(2) Derivation also of trait values above species level (positive and negative).

Final trait values and agreement scores for trait values from several resources are now calculated separately including and excluding restricted resources.

08 August 2018: Release of GIFT version 1.0

Data included in and workflows used to assemble GIFT 1.0 are described in detail in:

Weigelt, P., König, C. & Kreft, H. (2020) GIFT – A Global Inventory of Floras and Traits for macroecology and biogeography. Journal of Biogeography, 47, 16-43. doi: 10.1111/jbi.13623

All future changes will be documented here.

05 February 2018: Fiji and South West Pacific Islands checklists

GIFT now includes checklists and traits for Fiji and other parts of the South West Pacific from Flora Vitiensis Nova and Keppel et al. (2016)[dx.doi.org/10.1111/jbi.12805].

01 September 2017: Data update

New checklists, including New South Wales, Western Australia, the central part of European Russia and Afghanistan + thousands of new growth form and other trait records.

01 June 2017: Data update

Major update to GIFT: 261 new checklists and 60,000 trait records for Central Europe, Northern Africa and many small islands (e.g. off the coast of Croatia and Western Australia).

Map App Information

Use the map to explore what data is available in GIFT. The interface shows for a given combination of taxonomic group and floristic status, for what regions of the world a checklist is available. If wanted, regions can be coloured by species richness or proportion trait coverage for all traits available in GIFT. Use the drop down menu to specify what to show.

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