关键词: 无脊椎动物, 功能性状库, 分类分辨率, 标准化, 跨区域比较

Abstract

Background & Aim: Species functional traits provide the basis for investigating functional diversity in ecological communities. As an important dimension of biodiversity, functional diversity plays a key role in maintaining ecosystem functioning and stability. High-quality global functional trait databases have been developed for plants, birds, and freshwater fishes. In contrast, no unified functional trait database for freshwater benthic macroinvertebrates yet covers the major biogeographic regions. This review systematically synthesizes the historical development, major contents, and global distribution of benthic macroinvertebrate trait databases; compares their taxonomic coverage, trait coding, taxonomic resolution, data sources, trait dimensions, application contexts, and data missingness; and summarizes the development of trait-based research on benthic macroinvertebrates in China. 

Review Results: Existing databases are characterized by uneven geographic coverage, low taxonomic resolution, inconsistent trait definitions and coding systems, insufficient trait dimensions, and a shortage of locally measured trait data. These limitations reduce the comparability of trait information across regions and databases, may affect the estimation of functional diversity and trait phylogenetic signal, the detection of trait–environment relationships, cross-regional model extrapolation, and ultimately constrain the transition of functional trait research from explaining community responses to environmental change toward predicting ecosystem functioning. 

Prospects: To address these limitations, we propose a tiered roadmap for developing a unified global benthic macroinvertebrate trait database. Short-term priorities are to accumulate locally measured species-level traits and data on intraspecific variation. Medium-term efforts should harmonize trait terminology, taxonomic frameworks, coding rules, and metadata standards across regional databases. Long-term development should integrate trait data with species distributions, environmental variables, and phylogenetic information, and establish an open, unified global trait platform thereby providing a more reliable data foundation for aquatic biodiversity conservation, assessment, and management.

Key words: invertebrates, functional trait database, taxonomic resolution, standardization, cross-regional comparison