The phytoplankton traits thesaurus (PhytoTraits) is a reference work which properly describes concepts, represented by terms, widely used in phytoplankton functional ecology, focusing on morpho-functional traits. It contains approximately 120 terms and related semantic properties, decided and established under the agreement of a scientific expert community. PhytoTraits, providing harmonized concepts with associated unique and persistent identifiers (URI, Uniform Resource Identifier), has the potential to significantly reduce the barriers to data discovery, integration, and exchange.

The size density relationships web service calculates and describes the relationships between size (total biovolume and total carbon content) and density for any given combination of spatial, temporal and taxonomic level of observations. The service works on datasets structured according to the Phytoplankton Data Template that can be selected by the GUI or uploaded by the researchers. The input file is in CSV format with some mandatory fields (density, biovolume or cell carbon content). Before selecting or uploading the input file, users have to specify some parameters (e.g., the trait to be used for the size distribution, the taxonomic level for the size distribution and the spatial and temporal levels for the clusterization of data). The web service provides as output a zip file containing two summary tables in csv format and a scatter plot.