Do-It-Yourself Data Entry

While we have had awesome (paid) team members that search the literature and standardize the entry of data into the FRED framework, we encourage scientists to enter their own data and meta-data into FRED, both because you know your data best, and because you may have access to individual replicates or samples that may not have been included in a publicly available paper. We have written a series of guidelines to help facilitate this below. 

Note: An international team recently undertook a major effort to identify and synthesize novel root trait data from tropical systems using a subset of the FRED framework (TropiRoots; Cordeiro et al. 2025). These data were incorporated into FRED 4.0.

Note: The 'F000##' terminology used below refers to the unique IDs of associated columns. 

1. Aside from sentences and proper nouns, all text entries should be completely lowercase.
2. The following Column IDs should always be filled:

F00003, F00004: 'Abbreviated article citation', 'Data source_Citation'
F00055: 'Belowground Part' (Note: Write “CR + FR” if mean root diameter [Column ID F00679] is between 2.0 and 2.2.)
F00064: 'Root vitality_Roots living or dead'
F00071: 'Notes_Collection method'
F01185: 'Latitude_Main'
F01186: 'Longitude_Main'

3. The following Column IDs are to be filled where possible based on outside sources:

Fill the following columns in FRED based on The World Flora Online:

F01286: Plant taxonomy_Accepted genus_WFO
F01287: Plant taxonomy_Accepted species_WFO
F01344: Plant taxonomy_Accepted subspecies_WFO
F01289: Plant taxonomy_Accepted family_WFO (Note: If family is listed as Compositae, enter “Asteraceae” instead. If it is listed as Leguminosae, enter “Fabaceae” instead.)
F01290: Plant taxonomy_Accepted order_WFO (Note: If a species is listed as “Eulypod II” or “Polypodiales-Eulypod 1”, enter “Polypodiales” instead).
F01291: Plant taxonomy_Accepted group_WFO
F01413: Plant taxonomy_Species name unplaced_WFO (Note: If the species name is not present in The World Flora Online, enter “absent”. If the species name is listed as unresolved, enter “unresolved”.)

Fill the following columns from the TRY categorical traits package. Note: Use the read.CSV and write.CSV functions and the plyr package. If the species is not present in the TRY dataset, try searching for some of its synonyms that are listed on The World Flora Online. If you still cannot find it, make a note to this effect in Notes_Miscellaneous notes [Column ID F00079].

F00042: Plant leaf habit_TRY
F00041: Plant leaf type_TRY
F00043: Plant photosynthetic pathway_TRY
F00032: Plant growth form_TRY (Note: If the “climber” column is marked in TRY, change the growth form to “climber”. If the growth form column is empty in TRY, try searching for it in the Engelmann database, DOI: 10.1002/ecy.1569.)
F00044: Plant woodiness_TRY (Note: If the woodiness column is empty in TRY, but the growth form is listed as tree, shrub, or climber, enter, “woody”.)

Fill the following columns from the Taseski database.

F01456: Plant growth form_Taseski (Note: The support column codes in Taseski are F, C, P, E, H, M, and A. In FRED, please list these codes as “free-standing”, “climber”, “parasite”, “epiphyte”, “hemi-epiphyte”, “holo-mycoheterotroph”, and “aquatic”, respectively. If a species is not present in the Taseski database, list as “unspecified” in FRED.)

4. Potentially helpful site metadata that do not fit into their own column go in 'Notes_Location' [Column ID F01221].
5. Other potentially helpful metadata that do not fit into their own column go in 'Notes_Miscellaneous notes' [Column ID F00079].

1. Refer to Root Trait List to see root traits and associated definitions to determine where your data best fit.
2. If the units in your data differ from those in FRED, convert them, but only if there is a direct (i.e. mathematical) conversion; e.g., mm/cm2 to cm/m2. If the conversion requires making assumptions about the nature of the measurement (e.g., by assuming a soil bulk density), it may be necessary to discuss with ML McCormack (lmccormack@mortonarb.org). If assumptions are made, make a note about it in 'Notes_Miscellaneous notes' [Column ID F00079], or add a new column if necessary.
3. Freely add new columns if needed to accommodate an associated statistical metric (e.g. n, SE, min, max, median) for an already-present trait.
4. For new columns for traits that are not already present, defer to ML McCormack (lmccormack@mortonarb.org).
   
   Note: we will often use data from a global synthesis to help us find appropriate papers; in this case we attribute that synthesis in a column made specially for that (‘Data set_Citation’, Column ID F00006). But we then go back to check each original paper (where we can find them, in English), and add those papers one by one to the database. These data are then attributed to the original work in Column ID F00004 (‘Data source_Citation’). The reason we return to the original work is because we also want to harvest the ancillary data (soil characteristics, other root traits, etc.) and syntheses don’t often include everything from the original paper.