Traits provide key ecological information that can be applied to understanding the mechanisms which drive community assembly and persistence. In recent years, trait information has provided important insights into the responses of communities to stressors including pollutants and climatic extremes. Outside of Europe and North America, the use of stream macroinvertebrate traits has generally been hindered by the lack of a national database assigning traits to taxa. Here, we present an integrated database for Australian stream macroinvertebrates, which for the first time brings together data from multiple jurisdictions to facilitate the use of traits in both theoretical and applied studies. We describe the database and discuss its applications as well as challenges and limitations of this and other trait databases. The Australian trait database provides new opportunities for research and application in freshwater management.

性状提供了关键的生态信息，可用于理解推动社区集会和持久性的机制。近年来，特质信息为社区对压力源（包括污染物和气候极端事件）的响应提供了重要的见识。在欧洲和北美以外，由于缺乏将分类特征分配给分类单元的国家数据库，通常阻碍了河流大型无脊椎动物特征的使用。在这里，我们介绍了澳大利亚流大型无脊椎动物的综合数据库，该数据库首次将来自多个辖区的数据汇总在一起，以促进在理论研究和应用研究中使用特征。我们将描述数据库并讨论其应用以及该特征库和其他特征数据库的挑战和局限性。