Abstract
Accurately representing African ecosystems in land surface models (LSMs) remains challenging due to the limited availability and accessibility of ecological data like plant traits. We systematically classified African plant species represented in the TRY plant trait database into Plant Functional Types (PFTs) consistent with those in the JULES LSM, to enable improvements of PFT parameterization in these models. From the TRY database plant trait observations were obtained representing 2,082 plant species. We assigned classification parameters including growth form, leaf type, leaf phenology, photosynthetic pathway and climate zone using multiple sources. This delivered a sixfold increase in number of plant species that could be mapped to PFT classes from 265 to 1603 representing 137 families. It delivered a fivefold increase in the number of useable observations among the 27 traits evaluated. Our lookup table can be used to integrate existing plant trait data into PFT parameterisations in land surface models and similar large scale modelling exercises, to enhance the representation of African ecosystems and improve their capacity to simulate African ecosystems.
Data availability
All data and companion materials are deposited on Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16533069. The archive contains the PFT classification lookup table and supporting files, packaged as a versioned archive and licensed under CC0 1.0. The main lookup table is provided as Mapped_PFT_Harmonized.csv, which contains the finalized PFT classification. This table is intended for direct reuse as a lookup resource when assigning plant species to PFTs in ecological analyses and land-surface modelling workflows. A detailed description of every file and field is provided in README.md and DATA_column_descriptions.csv within the archive. These documents define variable names, codes, and dataset structure to facilitate reproducibility.
Code availability
The full codebase for the analysis and resulting outputs are available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16533069 under CC0 1.0 license.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Oppenheimer Programme in African Landscape Systems (OPALS), jointly funded by the University of Exeter, Sarah Turvill, and Oppenheimer Generations Research and Conservation. We thank the TRY database and all contributing data providers.
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Conceptualisation and Methodology development (E.F.A. and A.M.C.), Data curation, analysis, visualization, and Writing – original draft (E.F.A.), Manuscript review & editing (All authors), Funding (A.M.C. and T.P.), Supervision (A.M.C., K.W., P.H., A.H., and T.P.). All authors contributed to the final version of the manuscript.
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Akhabue, E.F., Cunliffe, A.M., Bett-Williams, K. et al. Critical classification parameters linking species to Plant Functional Type in African ecosystems. Sci Data (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-026-06728-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-026-06728-z
