Project Overview

Meet FRED

The FRED Initiative began as an international collaboration of root ecologists with an overarching goal of improving our understanding and model representation of fine-root traits and processes. To meet this goal, we looked to the long and rich history of observations of belowground plant traits, with a specific focus on fine roots, to serve as a solid foundation for our current understanding and as fuel for the next generation of measurements. The Fine-Root Ecology Database (FRED) was born (Iversen et al., 2017). In the years since, FRED has been used to understand and model root trait variation across the world.