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 We strongly encourage researchers to directly contribute data, including unpublished studies, as well as unpublished individual replicates not presented in published works, both to increase the number of observations as well as provide more detailed information about trait variation within a species or a site. After all…the next version of FRED is just over the horizon.
Types of Data Requested
Data collection for FRED is ongoing and will continue for the foreseeable future, with the expectation of contributions and updates from the user community.
Published data sources. We encourage researchers to notify us of published data sources that have not yet been incorporated into the continually updated list of FRED data sources. We also welcome submission of .CSV files or other organized files where these published data can be more easily obtained compared with manual collection from the published sources. This will facilitate more rapid inclusion of your data and enable us to work through a greater number of overall data sources.
Unpublished data sources. We are also accepting additional data sources that may include: (1) more detail on published data (e.g., data from individual replicates rather than the published plot mean or untransformed data from aggregate statistical analysis), or (2) data that have never been included in a publication. However, we are only soliciting data that the contributors are willing to make freely available to the broader scientific community with unrestricted access. We are happy to work with individual researchers to have a Digital Object Identifier assigned to their data set. Contact us for continued conversation off-line.
Data formats. Currently, we are accepting uploads of data sources as pdfs for original publications (we are not accepting images or scans at this time) as well as data organized in Excel, text, and comma separated value files. If the data contributor would find it easier to enter their data into the existing FRED framework, contact us for continued conversation off-line, and see one example of this from the TropiRoots team.
Submitting Data Files
Please use the following process to submit data contributions:
- Save your data in an appropriate format (as .XLSX, .XLS, .TXT, or .CSV).
- If the file is large, save data in a zipped folder, or in a Dropbox folder or Google Drive folder that is accessible to outside access. We would also appreciate a pdf of the accompanying paper and dataset citation if one exists.
- Share file, folder, or link with roots@ornl.gov and lmccormack@mortonarb.org.
- Pat yourself and your collaborators on the back! We're so grateful that you're sharing with FRED and the broader community of root and rhizosphere ecologists.
- Don't forget to let us know whether you and your collaborators would like to be added to our FRED Data Contributors page, as well as to the data DOI citation (e.g., this citation) for the FRED release that will include your contributed data.
What’s (Still) Missing
Each new version of FRED has seen a large increase in the number of root trait observations. However, the observations in FRED are unequally distributed across broad trait categories. Currently, the root trait categories in FRED with the least number of observations are root anatomy and root physiology; more details on the number of observations for these and other trait categories can be found here. Furthermore, FRED root trait observations tend to disproportionately sample temperate biomes; observations from the tundra and tropics are lacking.