SAMT

SAMT compiles a trait database of marine macrobenthic fauna from temperate South Australian waters to support trait-based analyses of biodiversity, functional diversity, and ecosystem functioning and is provided as an R package.

Key Features:

• Comprehensive Trait Database: Contains 13 distinct traits across 54 modalities covering life history, morphology, physiology, and behaviour for macrobenthic fauna.
• Extensive Taxonomic Coverage: Provides trait information for over 250 macrobenthic taxa from South Australia.
• Fuzzy Coding Procedure: Incorporates outcomes from a fuzzy coding procedure to represent trait variability within species across modalities.
• R Package Integration: Distributed with an R package for programmatic access and manipulation of the trait data.

Scientific Applications:

• Functional Assessments: Enables assessment of species contributions to ecosystem functions in marine soft sediments.
• Biodiversity Studies: Supports analyses of the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning in temperate Australian waters.
• Functional Diversity Analysis: Facilitates evaluation of functional diversity within macrobenthic communities using multimodal trait data.
• Ecosystem Functioning Research: Provides a trait framework for studying changes in ecosystem functioning under environmental or anthropogenic pressures.

Methodology:

Compiled from records of macrobenthic fauna from South Australia using a trait-based approach and fuzzy coding to classify species across multiple modalities.