What is EOL’s definition of a tree?
If you click on tree it goes to:
AberOWL, for instance.
In a nutshell are there limits on height, diameter,
etc.?
Good question! Sorry; we try to rely on ontology providers from the research community, and some of them are still working on their interfaces. We tend to adopt terms that are not very narrowly defined, because our data are aggregated from many sources that vary in their opinions about what is a tree. So while our definition of tree is just “whole plant arborescent”, (rather a tautology), for any given record of plant habit:tree in EOL, we try to provide any other information available at the source to help you judge what they meant by it. For instance, the USDA Plants database tries to explain their process for deciding on growth form categories, and we put that in the record metadata: https://eol.org/data/R133-PK125064288. Other providers might use something like a minimum height, or DBH.