As of December 2014 the TRY initiative has received more than 450 proposals requesting data. Some of these proposals are related to vegetation modelling, comprising a range of global vegetation and ecosystem models like LPJ, ORCHIDEE, JSBACH, JULES/ED and ED2. Other proposals are related to non-modeling ecological projects. Of these only a few are focused on analysing the plant trait data as compiled in the TRY database. The majority of proposals requested plant trait data as additional information to complement existing datasets for a range of different ecological questions, e.g. with respect to urban ecology, herbivory, plant species invasiveness, ecosystem productivity, soil decomposition, etc.

In the context of proposals focused on the analysis of trait data as compiled in the TRY database, the joint database offers improved opportunities to e.g. characterise intra- and interspecific trait variation (project 34), analyse the multidimensional spectrum of plant function (project 23), or identify plant functional types based on numerical traits (project 6). In this context the main advancement of the improved data availability in the integrated database compared to prior major plant trait databases, like GlopNet, LEDA, BiolFlor and others, seems to be the improved opportunity to analyse the variability of traits on top of general trends and relationships. However, so far these aspects seem not sufficiently explored yet. Apart from the improved data availability for questions in ecology the joint database also offers new perspectives, e.g. in combination with techniques recently developed in the context of machine learning or applied statistics. A first example for such an application is presented at the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) 2012 in the context of project 72.