Adding non-morphological traits

[AnahiEspindola]

From a user perspective, and thinking about important traits in insects, having databasing of ecological traits would be really important. For example, host plants, parasite hosts, range spanning, environmental preferences. In many insect groups these are sometimes used in species delimitation, and having this information entered would be very really important IMO. Some of this is also often present in labels, so I don't think this would be super crazy to add... maybe?

[seltmann]

I am also interested in this for bee functional traits such as sociality, floral host, and phenology. At least in part, this would correspond to the issue of alignment with other ontologies such as UBERON & RO #10

[meghalithic]

There are some ontologies attempting this, like GLOBI (biotic interactions, potentially parasites), PPO (phenology, which includes occurrence data), and OBA (attributes of species), FuTRES (vertebrate morphological traits), and I think @JCGiron is working on one for insects. Do these touch on what you mean, knowing that no one resource does all the things or focuses on just insects? If so, perhaps they could be brought into Phenoscape!

[seltmann]

@megbalk yes for them being brought into Phenoscape. I work with GloBIand we use RO for the relationships. Relates to #10

[JCGiron]

Yes!
General for insects we have AISM, and derived from it COLAO for beetles, and LEPAO for butterflies and moths.
There is also HAO, totally usable for annotation purposes but still needs to be integrated into the ODK (Ontology Development Kit) world.