Plant ecologists often need to collect "traits" data about plant species which are often scattered among various databases: TR8 contains a set of tools which take care of automatically retrieving some of those functional traits data for plant species from publicly available databases (The Ecological Flora of the British Isles, LEDA traitbase, Ellenberg values for Italian Flora, Mycorrhizal intensity databases, BROT, PLANTS, Jepson Flora Project). The TR8 name, inspired by "car plates" jokes, was chosen since it both reminds of the main object of the package and is extremely short to type.