Converting column data to matrix

I am trying to create a matrix of plant traits and plant species. There are 2,912,746 rows in the data and 3 columns. There are different numbers of traits for each species, and not every species has every trait. The data format is tab delimited. Current format-- Species Trait Value Species_1 SLA 4 Species_1 Photopath C3 Species_1 Mycorrhiza AMF Species_2 SLA 3 Species_2 Growth 10 Desired format-- SLA Photopath Mycorrhiza Growth Species_1 4 C3 AMF Species_2 3 10 Any help with this would be OH SO appreciated. It has been a quite the challenge, and I'm not sure where to begin. Thank you!!!! ~Mark Anthony