It’s past time for a belowground data revolution! The tangling of plant roots with the surrounding soil, the secret handshakes among plants and their numerous fungal and bacterial partners, and the rhythmic pulsing of belowground birth and death throughout the year all contribute to ecosystem processes in important ways. However, much of what happens in the unseen world beneath our feet remains shrouded in mystery. Increasingly, those of us focused on measuring belowground processes have dusted off our data, pooled them together, and freely shared these hard-won observations. Our hope is that they will be used by the broader community of root and rhizosphere ecologists to tackle some of the biggest questions in belowground ecology, and that the answers to these questions will be hard-coded into the models that inform our understanding of what the future may hold. Here I review the beginnings of the belowground data revolution, and encourage others to build on these efforts for an even more international, collaborative, and connected belowground community.
Results/Conclusions
After a decade of data compilation, less than 1% of observations in the global and popular TRY plant trait database were of fine roots. To address this shortfall, the Fine-Root Ecology Database (‘FRED’) was developed in synergy with the 'Rhizopolis' database to fill gaps in our global understanding of root traits, with an eye toward improving the representation of root form and function in terrestrial biosphere models. Recently, the sROOT international working group at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv), used FRED as a foundation to build the Global Root Traits Database (‘GRooT’), which provides ready-to-use data on a set of core root traits that can be used to answer important belowground questions. More recently, the ‘Open Traits Network’ was developed to synthesize trait observations and knowledge across the Tree of Life--spanning disparate trait databases and biological kingdoms. Looking forward, and as you’ll hear from the speakers earlier in this session, a holistic understanding of belowground systems cannot begin and end with plants alone, but must span the spectrum of plant roots, their mycorrhizal fungal partners, and associated bacteria that are both harmful and helpful. Furthermore, our belowground understanding must be underpinned by robust data from across the world, including understudied areas like the tundra and the tropics, agricultural data, and incorporating local-scale intraspecific trait variation. There’s more work to be done--join the belowground data revolution!