COMPADRE 3.0 is live!

by Rob Salguero-Gomez on Nov 27, 2014

November 11th 2014 marks what we anticipate as the beginning of a new era in plant population studies: It is our pleasure to introduce the COMPADRE Plant Matrix Database (version 3.0). Work initiated in the late 80s by Miguel Franco and Jonathan Silvertown, and continued by multiple individuals with the support of several funding agencies from Germany, Australia, the UK, Mexico, and Ireland has finally resulted in the release of completely open-access demographic information for over 600 plant species of global distribution. The release of this unprecedented global demographic effort, which can be accessed in the COMPADRE/COMADRE portal, has also been sync'ed with the publication of the manuscript that describes the database, the information within, and its potential. The publication saw the light as open-access early online view in Journal of Ecology on Nov 11th 2014 too. That very day, we also introduced the database and one of the lines of research we are developing using these data at the 2nd annual meeting of the Evolutionary Demography Society, held at Stanford. The publication of COMPADRE has also been accompanied with press releases from some of the participating institutions: Max Planck Institute for Demographic Reseach, Germany Centre for Excellence in Environmental Decisions, Australia Trinity College Dublin, Ireland University of Southern Denmark, Denmark COMPADRE has several extensions beyond the portal, such as R/MatLab routines and a fully resolved phylogenetic tree in our github repository, a facebook page, and a twitter account (@compadreDB). We are currently working on the COMPADRE version 3.1, which will contain more species, more demographic and covariate information, and some minor error-checks. We also have several workshop proposals in review to teach students how to use COMPADRE for comparative demographic analyses in ecology and evolution. Stay tuned... this is but the beginning of what we have in store! The COMPADRE team