Biodiversity and ecology are examples for ‘long-tail’ scientific domains: there are few large projects, many small ones; few large databases, but many small ones, etc.. In addition the characteristics of organisms – e.g. plant traits - are highly heterogeneous, exhibit a low degree of standardization and are linked and interdependent at various levels of biological organization: tissue, organ, plant and population. As consequence the data of organisms traits reside in a multitude of small databases, with little consolidation across datasets and are often not available for data reuse. To overcome this situation the TRY initiative (try-db.org) has developed a framework of intellectual property guidelines, data workflow and services to compile, consolidate and share public and non-public plant trait data. The framework respects the high efforts of trait measurements, while at the same time providing attractive incentives for data sharing: access to additional trait data, the opportunity of collaborations and co-authorship, and being cited if trait data are re-used via TRY. So far the initiative has successfully facilitated the compilation and consolidation of several hundred datasets of plant traits, and the re-distribution of customized datasets for scientific purposes.

In the context of the workshop we will provide information about the background of the TRY initiative and present the workflow for data compilation, consolidation and distribution.