Dear editor and authors,

The manuscript "AlgaeTraits: a trait database for (European) seaweeds" has been carefully reviewed considering the originality and content of the work. The present work developed a database platform with information on traits from different seaweed taxa. The review was carried out using data from an extensive bibliography and aimed to complement some gaps within this theme. The present study and its database platform will strongly contribute to future works, it will help in the interpretation of ecological, biodiversity, and biological data, as well as contribute to the advancement of functional studies within the area of marine algae. Therefore, through this, I recommend accepting the article. I leave just a few small doubts and suggestions.

Abstract: what do you mean by record (5^th line)? record of what? species?

Table A1: I suggest including species/genus examples for each trait in a new column.

Results: As well as in Table A1 I suggest starting with the ecological traits or changing the order in the table.

Best regards,

The research is well positioned and contextualized with the state of the art. The dataset really fills a gap in knowledge about algae traits in Europe and dataset is well describe in quality and quality. Data is shared via a persistent repository in a standardized way.

* Row 117: It would be interesting to have the survey filled by experts as an annex to this article

* Row 119: insert the reference to Aphia here (first time named)

* Row 334: Is the online editing interface already in place? If yes, it could be nice to have a reference (link) in the text.

An observation about shared data: even if upload process in WORMS or AlgaeBase follows a specific workflow and don’t take into account the format of uploaded files, material made available as “Archived data” should be checked in content, since there are some seemingly auxiliary columns (such as “Check_Sofie_and_Marine_17_March_2020” – column T of the file “3_Macroalgae_traits_additional_to_upload_final_annotation_complete.xlsx”) which are not standardized, have scarce meaning in the frame of the database and could surely be converted into more valuable information such as a binary column “checked” to evidence that some quality checks have been made before publishing data.