FRED 4.0 is available, beginning in October 2026! When you fill out the form below, you will receive an email token directing you to a searchable User Interface where you can filter the observations in the FRED database to only those observations of interest to you. This token will expire after 24 hours, but come back as often as you'd like!
Before downloading FRED through the user interface below, you may want to check out tips for using FRED. Also check out our Privacy Policy; FRED respects the privacy of all of our users and we take seriously our responsibility to protect all personal information that we collect.
Please let us know through the contact page if you notice any mistakes in FRED 4.0, and we will be happy to make these corrections in the next release. Our hope is that with help from you, we can make FRED as accurate and useful as possible to the broader ecological and modeling communities.
FRED 4.0 may be cited using the following Digital Object Identifier (DOI):
Nikitin T, McCormack ML, Iversen CM, Baer JK, Powell AS, Borden KA, Chen W, Collins C, Cordeiro AL, Cusack DF, Dallstream C, Fan Y, Fanin N, Freschet GT, Hewitt RE, Hogan JA, Hong XS, Kou L, Lachaise T, Laughlin DC, Lavely E, Liese R, Lin D, Meier CL, Meier IC, Montagnoli A, Picon-Cochard C, Pierick K, Roumet C, See CR, Soper F, Terzaghi M, Tumber-Dávila SJ, Valverde-Barrantes OJ, Wang C, Weemstra M, Wright SJ, Wurzburger N, Zadworny M. 2026. Fine-Root Ecology Database (FRED): A Global Collection of Root Trait Data with Coincident Site, Vegetation, Edaphic, and Climatic Data, Version 4. ESS-DIVE repository. Dataset. doi:10.15485/2587359 accessed via https://data.ess-dive.lbl.gov/datasets/doi:10.15485/2587359.
We encourage data users to cite original data sources where possible.