TOFF (i.e. Traits OF Fish) focuses on functional traits of fish (hagfishes, lampreys, chimaeras, sharks and rays, lobe-finned fishes, and ray-finned fishes). It aims at bringing together behavioral, morphological, phenological, and physiological BMPP traits coupled to environmental measurement context into a single open-source access repository. The database can host various types of data from multiple sources of literature (i.e. peer-reviewed articles, theses, monographs, and books).

It has been designed to contain “records” that are information about BMPP traits for a fish species, at a specified developmental stage (i.e. larvae, juvenile, or adult), sex, and ploidy level in a characterized environment from a scientific source. TOFF is a flexible SQL relational database using entity – attribute – value model coupled with controlled vocabularies. These latter ones are semantic tools, which consist of a list of terms, their definitions, and some of their properties such as their unit, their range (e.g., from 0 to 14 for pH), their spelling into drop-down menu (e.g., for categorical variables), or their format. To get access to the TOFF thesaurus, please see doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.10253219.v4.

The relational database schema contains five core modules. First, the Reference module stores bibliographic metadata (e.g., authorship, publication type, publication year). Second, the Trait module integrates functional traits included in the database. These traits are grouped into four classes (i.e. behavioral, morphological, phenological, and physiological traits). Third, the Measure module includes each measure (i.e. attribute of a trait) of a particular trait. It is linked to the Trait module. The Measure module includes also information about the effective size (i.e. notifying on how many individuals is based the trait measure), the ploidy level (e.g., diploid or triploid fish), the development stage (i.e. larvae, juvenile, adult, or unknown), the sex (i.e. male, female, hermaphrodite, or unknown), the type of measure (i.e. direct measurement, computed values, or predicted through modeling approach), and the name of measure recorder (i.e. the data contributor for a particular measure) associated to each measure. Fourth, the Environment module displays information about the environment in which the measures have been recorded. The environmental features are classified into three classes: abiotic environments (e.g., geographic occurrence, water parameters), biotic environment (e.g., population density, environment species diversity), and information about feeding (e.g., ad libitum). Fifth, the Species module (i.e. providing a table with the valid names of fish species based on FishBase species database (www.fishbase.org). For further details about TOFF structure please see DOI: 10.1038/s41597-019-0307-z.