Best Practices to future-proof trait data in ecological and evolutionary sciences

What is this?

Here is a community driven resource for best practices to future-proof trait data in ecological and evolutionary sciences.

The first idea come from the “Ten (mostly) simple rules to future-proof trait data in ecological and evolutionary sciences” in Methods in Ecology and Evolution doi:10.1111/2041-210X.14033. But this is a living document and is open for public additions from the scientific community.

I have some comments

You can add your comments by using the issue tracker

I want to create new docs/add new references

Please do!

  1. Anyone can fork the repos, change/add contents and make pull requests, or create an issue in the trackerin the folder _best-practices.
  2. Please keep to the nomenclature of files, as seen in the folder _best-practices. There is some order to this considering the Trait Life Cycle, so if creating new documents, order them by numbers where they fit best e.g. 03.1_my-new-best-practice.md
  3. Add new references if applicable to _best-practices/99_references.md
  4. An Editor will have a look at your changes, and either merge immediately or get back to you. For faster responses, consider tagging @chiras or @cpenone.

See CONTRIBUTING.md

I want to add an abstract in my language

You are encourage to add more languages of abstracts in Github, in the folder _best-practices/simple_abstracts/your-language.md

I have some questions

Please let us know by submitting an issue

Don’t want to use github? Please contact Caterina Penone or Alexander Keller

Contributors

Once your contribution is verified by our Editors and merged with the document, you will be added to the list of Contributors in the main page. We also encourage anyone re-using this text in future outlets to consider contributors.