About

TRY is a network of vegetation scientists headed by Future Earth, the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, and iDiv providing free and open access to plant trait data.

Plant traits - morphological, anatomical, biochemical, physiological or phenological features of individuals or their component organs or tissues - are a key to understanding and predicting the adaptation of ecosystems in the face of biodiversity loss and global change. In 2007 the TRY project was initiated to improve the empirical data basis for such projections, aimed at bringing together the different plant trait databases worldwide. In this context TRY is not an acronym, rather a statement of sentiment. Since 2007 the TRY Database is constantly growing and has accomplished an unprecedented coverage. TRY version 6 (released in October 2022) contains more than million trait records for 2661 traits of 6.24 million individual plants, representing 305,000 plant taxa (mostly species). About halve of the data are geo-referenced, providing a global coverage of more than 48,000 measurement sites.