FENNEC - Functional Exploration of Natural Networks and Ecological Communities

O_LISpecies composition assessment of ecological communities and networks is an important aspect of biodiversity research. Yet often ecological traits of organisms in a community are more informative than scientific names only. Furthermore, other properties like threat status, invasiveness, or human usage are relevant for many studies, but cannot be evaluated from taxonomy alone. Despite public databases collecting such information, it is still a tedious manual task to enrich community analyses with such, especially for large-scaled data.\nC_LIO_LIThus we aimed to develop a public and free tool that eases bulk trait mapping of community data in a web browser, implemented with current standard web and database technologies.\nC_LIO_LIHere we present the FO_SCPLOWENNECC_SCPLOW, a workbench that eases the process of mapping publicly available trait data to the users communities in an automated process. Usage is either by a local self-hosted or a public instance (https://fennec.molecular.eco) covering exemplary traits. Alongside the software we also provide usage and hosting documentation as well as online tutorials.\nC_LIO_LIThe FO_SCPLOWENNECC_SCPLOW aims to motivate public trait data submission and its reuse in meta-analyses. Further, it is an open-source development project with the code freely available to use and open for community contributions (https://github.com/molbiodiv/fennec).\nC_LI