Correspondence to: B. Bond-Lamberty

Abstract. Soil respiration – RS, the flux of CO2 from the soil to the atmosphere – is probably the least well constrained component of the terrestrial carbon cycle. Here we introduce the SRDB database, a near-universal compendium of pub-lished RS data, and make it available to the scientific com-munity both as a traditional static archive and as a dynamic community database that may be updated over time by inter-ested users. The database encompasses all published studies that report one of the following data measured in the field (not laboratory): annual RS, mean seasonal RS, a seasonal or annual partitioning of RS into its sources fluxes, RS temper-ature response (Q10), or RS at 10 ◦C. Its orientation is thus to seasonal and annual fluxes, not shorter-term or chamber-specific measurements. To date, data from 818 studies have been entered into the database, constituting 3379 records. The data span the measurement years 1961–2007 and are dominated by temperate, well-drained forests. We briefly examine some aspects of the SRDB data – its climate space coverage, mean annual RS fluxes and their correlation with other carbon fluxes, RS variability, temperature sensitivities, and the partitioning of RS source flux – and suggest some potential lines of research that could be explored using these data. The SRDB database is available online in a perma-nent archive as well as via a project-hosting repository; the latter source leverages open-source software technologies to encourage wider participation in the database’s future devel-opment. Ultimately, we hope that the updating of, and cor-rections to, the SRDB will become a shared project, managed by the users of these data in the scientific community