The Floral Reflectance Database

  FReD stands for the Floral REflectance Database. It is a database containing the spectral reflectances of many species of flower. A spectrophotometer is used to acquire these measurements. This works by shining a light on to the sample, and the proportion of light reflected back at the different wavelengths is measured.

  No. FReD is open-access and free for anyone to use.

  The database itself is a MySQL database. The front-end is written in JSP and HTML.

  There is reflectance data for over 2000 individual samples in the database. Other entries will be added as measurements from more flowers are gathered and published.

  FReD was developed by research students at Queen Mary, University of London in the UK, in collaboration with researchers at Kew Enterprises.

Using FReD

  FReD is straightforward. Either you can run a keyword search, simply entering the search term into the box on the sidebar and clicking "Search", or else you can use the advanced search form.

  The advanced search form allows you to search by particular characteristics, e.g. colour. Simply select the desired feature from a drop-down menu, or enter what you are looking for into a box. Be careful about spelling, especially with species names.

  In order to make the dataset as extensive as possible, when a flower contains several differently pigmented regions, often readings of all the different regions are taken. If you are only interested in the dominant colour of the flower, select "Yes" in the option to search for only results which correspond to the flower's main colour.

  It is unlikely that FReD is broken. It is probably the case that you restricted the search too much. For example, there may not be any light violet flowers from Argentina that grow between 200 and 700m above sea level in the database! Make your search more general and try again; you should see some results.

  If you are still having trouble, try clicking "Reset" on the Advanced Search form, and then reselect your search parameters.

  Simply click on the column header for the characteristic by which you want to order the data.

  In order to make FReD as large as possible, data were taken from many sources and publications. Some of these sources did not contain values for all the fields we list.