Image Credit: Tom Hausman/The Diamondback
University scientists are contributing a whole lot of data to conservation research.
With thousands of hours of input and by compiling hundreds of studies, university plant science researchers have helped put together the COMPADRE Plant Matrix Database with the Max Planck Institute and other institutions. This open-source collection of data for 598 species of plants can help scientists and conservationists alike, scientists said.
The database gathers data about birth and survival rates for each species, said Judy Che-Castaldo, a postdoctoral researcher in the plant science department.
“Based on these values,” she said, “you can estimate how much the population is going to swell or decline.”
Che-Castaldo and Maile Neel, a plant science professor, were interested in conservation before becoming this university’s two primary contributors to the database at this university. They contributed 30 to 40 percent of the data. This catalog will help them and others find a scientific approach to protect endangered species, they said.
A species stays on the endangered species list until the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service determines it is abundant enough to no longer need protection, Neel said. This is called recovery, when threats have been removed and species are at a stable population, and the COMPADRE database could help quantify when recovery has occurred.
“We’ve been working on scientific approaches to helping the Fish and Wildlife Service to determine when a species can come off the list, so at what abundance something is secure enough to know it’s protected,” Neel said.
Each of the hundreds of studies in the database contains a matrix of data for the numbers of plants at a certain stage of life — seed, adult/juvenile — and how many of them survive, Che-Castaldo said. This information can be used to extrapolate survival data within the species and among similar plants.
“Unfortunately, for most of these species that are endangered, we don’t have this data,” Che-Castaldo said. “That’s why it’s useful that we have so much data for other species, to look for trends or patterns so we can apply them to the endangered species.”
By running analyses on these matrices, scientists can predict how certain tactics will change the population of a species over time, Che-Castaldo said.
“We can see: If we were able to manage the adults to actually produce 100 offspring, how does that improve the population?” she said.
Data like these can show conservationists where to focus their money and efforts, Neel said. For instance, using data, researchers can see it’s more effective to protect adult sea turtles than eggs and nesting sites because many hatchling turtles don’t survive into adulthood anyway.
Though COMPADRE deals only with plant species, Che-Castaldo is working on a similar database for animals, specifically for birds, she said.
In addition to helping conservationists, these kinds of data can also help make studying these plants easier. Before, if researchers wanted to study these plants, they might have to spend years collecting their own data, but now it’s already available to them, Neel said.
“[COMPADRE] takes our data, and then it goes into this worldwide resource that anybody can access,” Neel said. “It’s open-source. Anyone can use the data for their own purposes and ask larger questions that couldn’t be asked otherwise.”
Margaret Palmer, an entomology professor at this university who was not involved with COMPADRE, suggested that this kind of openness represents a shift in research priorities.
“Large, open access databases like COMPADRE are exciting because they open the door to a host of new research,” Palmer wrote in an email. “Ecologists have recently been called out for being unwilling to share their data […] but COMPADRE and the large number of studies it represents are evidence that the culture is shifting.”
Neel said the database is straightforward science that can be applied to many problems and hopefully contribute to some conservation solutions.
“That’s our goal,” she said, “to take high-quality basic science and apply it to a critical conservation need.”
