Root Trait Data Contributions

These data belong to all of us.

The FRED Initiative began as a grass roots community effort, and the resulting FRED database is a community product; these data belong to all of us. We fully recognize how hard-won and precious these observations are, and we hope that FRED will be used by the broader community of root ecologists and terrestrial biosphere modelers to advance our understanding of belowground processes in ecosystems across the globe. Furthermore, FRED is built on community data and its continued improvement and expansion hinges largely on community interest and engagement. We strongly encourage researchers to directly contribute data, including unpublished studies, as well as unpublished individual replicates not presented in published works, both to increase the number of observations as well as provide more detailed information trait variation within a species or a site. After all…the next version of FRED is just over the horizon.