Tropical root traits in response to global changes from 1984 to 2023

This dataset is a compilation of tropical root traits data in response to different global changes in tropical sites, considering 23.50N and S as latitudinal boundaries. The global changes considered are warming, drought, flooding, cyclones, nitrogen addition, CO2 fertilization, and fire. This dataset contains 266 root trait observations from 93 studies across 24 tropical countries. The full citation from where the data was taken from is provided in the dataset, as well as the global change, the ecosystem type, location, coordinates, the root traits measured, and the direction of their response after the global change. Additional information such as the duration of the experiment, the intensity of the global change, the soil layers from where the roots were collected, the root orders, and the type of experiment are also shown. We obtained this dataset by performing a systematic literature review on Web of Science using standardized keywords in English, Spanish, and Portuguese (Yaffar, Lugli et al. in press). Data is included as a single CSV file: "tropical_roots_main_dataset_20240702134431.csv" This dataset was originally published on the NGEE Tropics Archive and is being mirrored on ESS-DIVE for long-term archival Acknowledgement: This study was supported by the Next Generation Ecosystem Experiments-Tropics, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Biological and Environmental Research, and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory managed by UT-Battelle, LLC, for the DOE under contract DE-AC05-1008 00OR22725. This review is a result of activities involving many members of the TropiRoot Research Network, to whom we are grateful. This network was funded in part by the New Phytologist 28th Workshop: “Coordinating and Synthesizing Tropical Forest Root Trait Studies: Understanding belowground NPP, root responses to global change, and nutrient acquisition dynamics across tropical forests,” held in at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, April, 2023. L. F. Lugli would like to thank the financial support of the Bayerische Staatskanzlei through the grant associated with the Amazon-FLUX project. I.C. Meier wishes to thank the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) for the financial support awarded within the Heisenberg program (grant no. ME 4156/5-1). M Arnaud was supported by HORIZON-MSCA-2021-PF-01 grant funding to Sorbonne University, grant 10106240. DF Cusack was supported by US Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science Early Career Award DE – SC0015898, and US National Science Foundation (NSF) Division of Environmental Biology (DEB) Long Term Research in Environmental Biology (LTREB) award #2332006.