FuTRES: Functional Trait Resource for Environmental Studies

Functional traits are the features of organisms that directly interact with the environment. Studying change and variation in these traits across space, time, and taxonomy can inform how species have responded to environmental and climatic change, how communities are assembled, and other eco-evolutionary questions. Trait data are collected at the individual level; however, animal trait databases often report these data at the species level, undermining their value for researchers who want to look at variation within species and rendering trait data ambiguous when taxonomy is updated. Additionally, these data are often recorded in auxiliary fields, such as “field notes” or hidden in supplementary materials or published tables, making them difficult to recover by researchers. Furthermore, animal trait data from paleontological, zooarchaeological (from archaeological sites), and neontological specimens are typically curated in separate forums and formats that are not easily integrated to provide perspective across the entire range of time. We are developing a toolkit to overcome these challenges called FuTRES: Functional Trait Resource for Environmental Studies. We seek to make these data accessible, standardize trait descriptions across Vertebrata, and teach (future) scientists how to create FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable) trait datasets. To make data more FAIR, FuTRES employs ontologies, a logical framework for relating terms to search datasets and standardizing traits across datasets. FuTRES builds off existing ontologies and standards, such as UBERON for anatomical terms and PATO and OBA for trait terms, as well as create new terms that are general enough to be used for all vertebrates and multiple disciplines. This talk will showcase the semantic framework underpinning FuTRES, describe how we are linking diverse trait datasets to ontologies and, therefore, each other, and report the results of a preliminary analysis of integrated datasets

Zacpeten Structure 719: Activities at a Contact Period \u3ci\u3ePopol Nah\u3c/i\u3e Before Rapid Abandonment

This paper addresses activities carried out in a late-sixteenth or seventeenth century Maya council house (popol nah) just before its abandonment. Structure 719 at the site of Zacpeten in the central Peten lakes district is considered a noble residence remodeled into a council house with an adjacent temple. Excavations revealed quantities of de facto refuse inside the structure\u27s two rooms and around the exterior; recent studies focused on ceramics, lithics, faunal remains, and net sinkers. The back room held abundant lithics and diverse fauna, with evidence of grinding red pigment and snapping obsidian prismatic blades into segments for fashioning arrow points. Pottery and faunal remains indicate feasting, as well as possible use of animal parts in ritual and in making ceremonial objects. The Group 719 complex served as a center of production of various goods and community ritual until its abrupt abandonment, likely in the first decade or so of the eighteenth century

A solution to the challenges of interdisciplinary aggregation and use of specimen-level trait data.

Understanding variation of traits within and among species through time and across space is central to many questions in biology. Many resources assemble species-level trait data, but the data and metadata underlying those trait measurements are often not reported. Here, we introduce FuTRES (Functional Trait Resource for Environmental Studies; pronounced few-tress), an online datastore and community resource for individual-level trait reporting that utilizes a semantic framework. FuTRES already stores millions of trait measurements for paleobiological, zooarchaeological, and modern specimens, with a current focus on mammals. We compare dynamically derived extant mammal species' body size measurements in FuTRES with summary values from other compilations, highlighting potential issues with simply reporting a single mean estimate. We then show that individual-level data improve estimates of body mass-including uncertainty-for zooarchaeological specimens. FuTRES facilitates trait data integration and discoverability, accelerating new research agendas, especially scaling from intra- to interspecific trait variability