Plant traits are critical to plant form and function —including growth, survival and reproduction— and therefore shape fundamental aspects of population and ecosystem dynamics as well as ecosystem services. Here, we present a global species-level compilation of key functional traits for palms (Arecaceae), a plant family with keystone importance in tropical and subtropical ecosystems. We derived measurements of essential functional traits for all (>2500) palm species from key sources such as monographs, books, other scientific publications, as well as herbarium collections. This includes traits related to growth form, stems, armature, leaves and fruits. Although many species are still lacking trait information, the standardized and global coverage of the data set will be important for supporting future studies in tropical ecology, rainforest evolution, paleoecology, biogeography, macroecology, macroevolution, global change biology and conservation. Potential uses are comparative eco-evolutionary studies, ecological research on community dynamics, plant-animal interactions and ecosystem functioning, studies on plant-based ecosystem services, as well as conservation science concerned with the loss and restoration of functional diversity in a changing world. ; ReferenceToSpecies_PalmTraits_1.0References per species, i.e. a tab-delimited text file containing all references that have been used for each speciestdwg_level3_shpA (zipped) shape file with all botanical countries (TDWG level 3 units) worldwide, data to be used with R scriptpalms_in_tdwg3Presence-absence data of palms at the resolution of botanical countries, data to be used with R scriptTREEPhylogenetic information of palms represented as maximum clade credibility (MCC) tree, data to be used with R scriptAllReferences_PalmTraits_1.0Full list of references used to compile the dataPalmTraitsDemoAn R script containing code that allows to combine the PalmTraits 1.0 database with species distribution and phylogenetic informationPalmTraits_1.0Dataset with palm ...