Trait Databases: What is the End Goal?

For the past few years I’ve been involved in a collaboration to put together a broad-coverage life history database for mammals, reptiles, and birds. The project started because my collaborator, Nathan Myhrvold, and I both had projects we were interested in that involved comparing life history traits of reptiles, mammals, and birds, and only mammals had easily accessible life history databases with broad taxonomic coverage. So, we decided to work together to fix this. To save others the hassle of redoing what we were doing, we decided to make the dataset available to the scientific community. While this post started out as a standard “Hey, check out this new publication from our group” post (Here it is, by the way: Myhrvold, N.P., ^†E. Baldridge, B. Chan, D. Sivam, D.L. Freeman, S.K.M. Ernest. 2015. An Amniote Life-history Database to Perform Comparative Analyses with Birds, Mammals, and Reptiles. Ecology 96:3109), I’ve realized that there’s something more important that needs to be discussed: what is the future of trait databases?

Trait databases are all the rage these days, for good reason. Traits are interesting from evolutionary and ecological perspectives: How and why do species differ in traits, how do traits evolve, how quickly do traits change in response to changing environment, and what impacts do these differences have on community assembly and ecosystem function. They have the potential to link individual performance with local, regional, and even global processes. There’s lots of trait data out there, but most of it has been buried in papers, books, theses, gray literature, field guides, etc. This has led to the explosion of compendiums compiling trait data. Some of these are published as Data Papers (e.g.: Mammals: Jones et al 2009 , Plankton: Kremer et al 2014) or on-line databases (e.g. AnAge, FishBase), which are open for everyone to use. Many of these open datasets are generated by a small number of scientists to address some particular question. Some are quasi-open/quasi-private resources generated by consortiums of scientists (TRY).

There are a variety of issues regarding these trait compendiums, not least of which is these trait compendiums pull data from numerous sources, but how do data generators get credit and what type of credit is reasonable? This is a doozy that I don’t have an answer to. Instead, my focus today is on the eventual endgame of trait databases. No trait database currently being produced has all the trait data of interest for every species. This means we have a bunch of incomplete data products running around. So, every few years, a bigger – more complete, but still incomplete – trait dataset is produced for some group of species. Sometimes the bigger dataset replicates the effort of the smaller one, sometimes it incorporates the smaller compilation whole-cloth, sometimes they have little overlap in sources whatsoever. Data compilations vary in the ease of use and accessibility. Some databases are widely known, some are known only to a few insiders. I could keep going. Clearly this state of affairs is less than optimal for rapid progress in studying traits.

So what’s the end game here? What should we be doing? In my opinion, what we need is a centralized trait database where people can contribute trait data and where that data is easily accessible by anyone who wants to use it for research (not just to the contributing members of the database). It would also be nice if people who contribute significant amounts of data (no, I’m not going to define that here) could get specific credit for that contribution – maybe as a Data Paper or E-Publication. To encourage people to not just download data, add to it, and then sit on the expanded dataset, embargoes could be put in place to allow people to add their data to the dataset but have the data protected for a limited period of time to allow that researcher to get first crack at the publications using that entry. It’d be really nice if people who use the database could easily download all the references for the data they used so it can be easily incorporated into a literature cited section. The central database could get credit (let’s face it, it needs to be able to justify the funding that such an endeavor would require) by having people register papers published using data from the database. They could then keep track of numbers of pubs and citations to those pubs to help track the database’s impact.

Right about now, my Paleo brethren may be thinking “this sounds suspiciously familiar”. I’ve pretty much lifted this list right off of the Paleobiology Database website (https://paleobiodb.org/#/faq). While ecologists have been running our every database for itself experiment on Trait Databases, the Paleobiologists have been experimenting with collaborative open databases for fossil records. I’m an outsider, so I don’t really know how the database is perceived within the paleo community, but from the outside I have been a big fan of the database, the work that has emerged from its existence, and the community that surrounds it. Which is why I’ve wondered if ecology could some something similar.

But if we’re going to do this, I think we need to copy something else from the Paleobiology Database: a focus on individual records. Currently, many trait databases focus on a species-level value; what is the average number of offspring per litter? Seed Mass? Average body size? This is a logical place to start building a database if many of the questions are focused on comparing central tendencies across species. But our understanding of traits and the questions we want to ask have evolved. Having any info is still better than no info, but often we need info on variability across individuals within a species or we want to know how the trait might vary with changes in the environment. For this, we need record-level data. By this, I mean that instead of pooling observations to obtain an average for a species, we now often want to know that the average litter size for a species at location X is 3 but 8 at location Y. For some species, traits are especially sensitive to temperature or some other environmental variable – so knowing if the body size was measured at 28C or 32C can be important. This data could then be summarized in whatever way the user needed (species-averages, region-specific averages, etc). This, of course, is the hard part, because while we have an increasing number of trait compilations, they have either jettisoned the record information, or little of the record info is associated with the datapoint except maybe the citation name (I say this knowing I’m guilty of this). It also involves doing some form of georeferencing if we want the location info to be useable (like they’ve been doing for museum records). This means we would need to basically uncompile the compilations – find the original citations, extract as much info as we can from them, and then re-enter them as part of a more sophisticated database. This is an extraordinary amount of work that (to be clear) I am not volunteering for.

There are undoubtedly some in the trait community who are about to explode because they’ve been thinking “but we’re doing what you are talking about!”. There are indeed already some bigger initiatives out there (AnAge, FishBase, TRY) but they are either not community-based (i.e. run by a closed group), taxon-centric, or a nightmare of open and closed policies that make extracting data needlessly burdensome, or some unfortunate combo of the above. The one that seems closest to the Paleobiology Database model is TraitBank at the Enyclopedia of Life. Its goal, however, is different from the record-based trait database that I outlined above. Its goal is to have a webpage (and trait data) for every species on the planet, so this still seems to be a species average approach. As I mentioned before, some info is better than no info, so this alone would be a huge benefit to trait research, but still carries the restrictions of species-average values. On the plus side, data in the database is available for everyone to use and each data entry has the specific reference listed with it. But I don’t think it’s had broad buy-in from the trait community. TraitBank only lists 50 data sources and 327 “content partners” (websites/databases that have agreed to share their data via Encyclopedia of Life pages). Admittedly, these sources are some of the biggest data aggregations around, but it’s inconceivable that they cover the wide array of trait info for all of life. Without broad buy-in from the trait community, both using it for research and contributing their data to it, I don’t see this working in the way I’ve outlined above.

So where does this leave us? Well, things are currently in a muddle with respect to trait data, but there’s also tremendous opportunity for someone who can envision the type of database the field needs, sell broad swaths of the trait data community on its importance, and figure out how to build both the database and the community to support and use it. This may involve better community buy-in with TraitBank and/or some new initiative working on a record-level product that would allow a finer-level of question to be asked. The question is how does this happen and is there enough will in the trait community to give up on the current idiosyncratic ad hoc approach and contribute to something with broad trait and taxonomic coverage with an open data policy?

On Ecological Rants and Microcosms

Recently, over at the blog Ecological Rants the eminent ecologist Charles Krebs wrote a post about the ills of simplification in ecology. The post focuses specifically on how ecology has been ‘led astray’ by simplified models and lab studies. This has recently been picked up on Dynamic Ecology by Jeremy Fox who responded generally to the post but specifically to the affront to microcosms. I strongly recommend you check them out for yourself and not just rely on my version of events.

I went on record a long time ago (in blog years I think 2011 was a century ago) that I believe that we need a multitude of approaches, so I don’t plan on wading into the microcosm debate. That we’re still having this debate exhausts me. Instead, I want to focus on a different angle in Kreb’s post. Here’s the specific section:

“If we assume equilibrial dynamics in our communities and ecosystems, we fly in violation of almost all long term studies of populations, communities, and ecosystems. The problem lies in the space and time vision of our science. Our studies are too short to show even a good representation of dynamics over a 100 year time scale, and the problems of landscape ecology highlight that what we see in patch A may be greatly influenced by whether patches B and C are close by or not. We see this darkly in a few small studies but are compelled to believe that such landscape effects are unusual or atypical. This may in fact be the case, but we need much more work to see if it is rare or common. And the broader issue is what use do we as ecologists have for ecological predictions that cannot be tested without data for the next 100 years?”

I agree with a lot of this paragraph, though my perspective on it is different. I agree that our focus for much of the past 60 years in community ecology has been on equilibrial dynamics at a specific spatial scale with limited understanding on the impact context (i.e. what patches are near what other patches) can have on the local community. Does this make it difficult for us to predict what will happen in the dynamic world we actually live in? Yes. But unlike Krebs I don’t see the past few decades of research as a waste. We’ve learned a great deal about the fundamentals of ecological systems – species interactions, food web structure, biodiversity, niche partitioning, colonization, extinction, etc etc etc – all with the help of microcosms and simplified theory (and field studies and macroecology). We needed those decades of work to understand the basics of how communities are structured under idealized conditions.

Left: A child’s line drawing of SpongeBob’s Squidward. Right: Squidward.Does the drawing capture the essence of squidward? I’m biased, but I say yes. But how does a child get to being able to create a reasonable facsimile of something without first learning how pencils work, how they respond to hand movement, and how to simplify an image but still make it recognizable to others? I think this is also true with ecology. How do we know how to reasonably abstract a complicated system down to its most important components without first understanding what the components are and how to convey them in simple understandable ways?

Now, our challenge is to take what we have learned and apply it to the more complicated scenarios that are happening in nature (i.e. how does our Squidward change as he interacts with the dynamic setting of Bikini Bottom*). How do ecosystems change through time? What is the role of species interactions, context-dependence, and processes at different spatial and temporal scales in driving (or ameliorating) changes in food webs, niche partitioning, etc? These are pressing questions for our society as we try to predict how nature will respond to human perturbations, but these are also important for the basic development of our science. Some of this work will be done through detailed case studies out in the field, but some (hopefully) will be done with the help of theory, controlled experiments, and data-intensive approaches like macroecology to generate generalizations that help us know how to think and predict likely responses and scenarios.

The danger that I think Krebs is concerned about is that we become so attached to our clean, simplified view, our polished theories, that we refuse to engage with the more complicated scenarios. For example, if long-term studies suggest that the focus on equilibrial communities is misplaced, it would be to our detriment to continue to focus only on equilibrial communities in our theories and experiments. However, I don’t think this is happening (or if it was, I think momentum is shifting). Landscape ecology, metacommunity theory, biogeography, are all areas where people have been actively studying the very spatial issues Krebs bemoans us neglecting. I think he is more accurate about community ecology shying away from rigorously thinking about temporal dynamics, but I have a whole post on that planned, so I’ll spare you my rant. That we are starting to think about these more complex issues is what makes ecology exciting right now (and frustrating and really really hard). We have a grasp (tenuous, maybe, but a grasp nonetheless) on the fundamental, general concepts that bridge across ecosystems and organisms. We have more data, better tools, and better theoretical constructs than at any time in the past. Now is the time to tackle these more complex questions and to do so will require all the scientific approaches available to us – that includes field ecology, macroecology, theory, and, yes, microcosms.

*Yes I have been forced to watch too much SpongeBob lately.

Sciencing with a chronic illness: Tips, tricks, & technology

*This is a guest post by Elita Baldridge.**

This is the third in a series of posts about my experiences completing a PhD with a chronic illness (Part 1, Part 2, and background information).

Not only is this about the tools that I used to complete my PhD, but I am optimistic that these tools/coping mechanisms will allow me to be a scientist that gets paid for doing science.

The tips & tricks:

Remote work: Working remotely accommodated the variability in my functioning levels, and allowed me to be as productive as possible without having to allocate most of my energy to getting to/working at a physical location or trying to conserve enough energy so that I could make it home on the bus (since I can’t drive anymore).

Ergonomics: Finding what triggered more discomfort and what allowed me to work for longer periods of time really helped make it possible for me to finish up.

• Laptop of Science & a desktop, running Synergy to run one mouse and keyboard for both computers.
• Monitor risers to prevent fatigue.
• Kneeling chair to avoid obnoxious pressure points on hips, back and arms.
• Wrist rests galore.
• Kinesis Freestyle 2 keyboards, one for desk work with the dual machine setup, one for a reclining setup with just the Laptop of Science.)

Travel: Travel is dreadful. It involves a lot of discomfort while traveling, plus a lot of discomfort for weeks after. The thing that I am traveling for had better provide enough benefits to me that it is actually worth it because it is truly, truly unpleasant (of the crying and vomiting from pain variety). Remote attendance is vastly preferred.

However, if I really, really must:

• Grabber 12+ hour Peel N’ Stick body warmers, which make it possible to function on a reasonably human level most of the time.
• Cane or forearms crutches
• Wheelchair service in airports/Redcap on trains. (Voice of Experience: When you are asked if you can get to places on your own, up stairs, etc., select “no” if the answer is “yes, but it will be exceptionally unpleasant and there may be crying, whimpering, or falling over”.)
• Rest day after travel/accommodations really close to wherever you are supposed to be.
• Electric blanket for hotel (as full body heat pad)\
• Small travel blanket (for padding uncomfortable chair backs, etc.)

The technology:

Version control: Using version control (I used GitHub) allowed for a more efficient workflow between me & dissertation collaborators (mostly Ethan, but also Xiao Xiao), plus I was insulated against the effects of cognitive dysfunction through commit messages, issues, and the ability to revert commits.

Kubi: A teleconferencing robot that allowed me to turn my (remote) head and look at people when they were speaking through whatever teleconferencing system we were using. I cannot say enough good things about how much this made me feel more like a part of whatever was going on.

Web conferencing: We tended to use browser based options Google Hangouts or Firefox Hello for this, but Skype is another option as well, I just had some difficulty getting it to behave well on my laptop.

Live-streaming: For my defense, I wanted to make the presentation a demonstration of making a talk accessible, and also how easy this can be. Full details of the accommodations & accessibility statement that I used for my defense are available on the event announcement. I used Google Hangouts on Air to live-stream my defense, then close captioned the talk afterward with the editor available on YouTube. This was all straightforward and took very little time. Handouts were available in advance of the talk, and an accessibility statement was provided with my defense announcement.

Data Carpentry receives Moore Foundation funding

For the last 5 years I’ve been actively involved in training efforts through Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry to train researchers in best practices for software development and data analysis. These are concepts that are fundamental to the research we do in my gropu and my commitment to open and reproducible research.

As one of the founding members of the Data Carpentry Steering Committee, I am excited to announce that Data Carpentry has received a grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation that will help support our work over the next two years.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Data Carpentry, we are a non-profit organization whose goal is to help teach scientists the skills they need to manage and analyze the increasingly large amounts of data that are being generated across the sciences. We do this through a combination of 2 day workshops at universities (if you’re interested in a workshop at your university request one here), and online resources including lesson material and forums. Data Carpentry is both similar to, and associated with, Software Carpentry, but with an emphasis on teaching material that is specific to particular scientific disciplines and focused on data management and analysis. We currently deliver courses for ecology/organismal biology and are in the process of developing material on genomics and geospatial data. The later in collaboration with awesome training group at NEON.

The support from the Moore Foundation will help us expand our efforts to cover new scientific domains, run far more workshops than we could have otherwise, and develop strategies for delivering this material in online workshops. I will also be leading the development of a semester long Data Carpentry course designed to make it easy to integrate these crucial skills into university classrooms. Check out the full proposal for more details.

I look forward to continuing my work with Data Carpentry and am excited about the opportunity for us to continue to enable data-intensive science by providing scientists the computational and data-oriented training they need to work with the large quantities of data we now have access to.

External challenges of chronic illness (in graduate school)

This is a guest post by Elita Baldridge (@elitabaldridge). She is a recently finished PhD in our group who has been navigating the development of a chronic illness during graduate school and beyond.

This is the second in a series of posts about my experiences completing a PhD with a chronic illness (Part 1, see also these two earlier, posts).

As I mentioned in the first post, having a chronic illness means that there can a lot of problems hiding behind the cheerful facade of graduate students you know. Here I describe some of the external challenges faced by people with chronic illness and disabilities that can be a much greater stumbling block than the condition itself.

Because I had such strong support from my family and my lab, I didn’t have to worry about  the majority of these challenges. I didn’t have to worry about finances, losing health insurance, not being able to afford medical care, having to be on campus, able to work a regular schedule.  Thus, I just had to deal with the physical challenges, and I could invest most of my energy into my research.

Finances/health insurance: Being able to afford medical care as well as paying for all of the regular expenses of being a PhD students can be extremely difficult. Although many PhD programs offer subsidized insurance, the long process of diagnosis, combined with extensive medical tests, plus the expense of treatment can leave massive amounts of medical debt. These issues can be magnified if a leave of absence is necessary, which typically eliminates both salary and insurance. Additionally, during a leave of absence, any student loans come out of deferment, making a leave of absence extremely challenging to take, and a chronic illness is unlikely to improve with a leave of absence with the added financial stress. I have a husband, who has health insurance for the both of us, and we were able to move in with my parents, and this was a situation that has been actually really great for everyone. This completely removed financial/health insurance worries from the picture, and there is always someone around for me just in case.

Advisor support:  A good advisor is important for all graduate students, but it becomes especially important when dealing with a chronic illness.  There are many stories of graduate students who have  struggled way more than neccessary due to unsupportive advisors, or unsupportive university structures. (e.g., 1, 2, 3). The Weecology lab is awesome, and just made accommodations happen. In a later post, I’ll talk about some of the technological tools that made completing my PhD possible, but my favorite was the Kubi (https://revolverobotics.com/), which let me turn my own “head” when I was remoting in. Ethan also was my advocate at the university level, to make things happen so that I could work remotely to finish up.

Working: Chronic illness can result in many factors that make getting work done challenging, from the difficulty of getting to work, due to an inability to drive, chronic fatigue, medication effects, cognitive dysfunction, or being worn down by pain and discomfort. Even the physical environment of work can be challenging; for example, fluorescent lighting that triggers migraines. Getting to campus was taxing enough that by the time I got there, I was too worn out to get much done, and would have to leave early before I broke down.  I also had to surrender my driver’s license, so I relied on public transportation (which caused a significant amount of “discomfort”) or I needed to get a ride from my husband (which caused slightly less “discomfort”).  In addition, I have flares, so I’m good to work some days, but then am unable to function either physically or mentally some days. University campuses also tend to have some major accessibility problems. I was fortunate in that my office and the lab that I taught in were on the first floor, but when I returned for my defense I had to get to the second floor of a building with a broken elevator. Working remotely allowed me to set up my workspace so that I could work longer, and didn’t have to use up all my available energy going to campus to work.

Medical: Many chronic conditions require frequent medical care, through monitoring or trying out treatment options. My condition is chronic, but not progressive, and so I didn’t actually need a lot of medical care after I got my diagnosis. We’d figured out a treatment that worked before then, and I had a great doctor (USU Student Health Center is awesome, particularly Dr. Price). Thus, I didn’t need to spend a lot of time at doctor’s appointments, which for me would end up writing off an entire day, and then generally take the next day to recover from the appointment. Before my diagnosis, I was spending a lot of time at the doctor, experimenting with new medications, to see if they would have an effect, being poked more times than a pincushion, and waiting to see specialists.

Medication:  Medications for chronic illness can have a lot of unpleasant side effects, including nausea, headaches, appetite loss, insomnia, fatigue, immune suppression, etc.  Some of us end of taking medication to treat the side effects of the medication we are on to treat our condition. Most of the treatment options for fibromyalgia work by altering levels of neurotransmitters, and thus tend to be difficult to adjust to, have a long adjustment period, and make working while adjusting impossible. In addition, the beneficial effects generally wear off over time, leaving just the negatives, which happened with the first medication I was on. Because I didn’t have months to spend trying to find another medication that might work, and I was getting work done without medication, I saved that until after I was done with my PhD. I’ve spent the last two months dealing with adjusting to a fibromyalgia treatment I haven’t tried before, am minimally functional, and it seems as if this treatment option is worse than the fibromyalgia on its own. Because fibromyalgia is variable, I still have another two months to go to make sure that the medication is not effective, or whether I could be in a flare instead.