Root distribution by depth for temperate agricultural crops
By Jianling Fan, B. McConkey, Hong Wang, H. Janzen. 2016
477 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract Root distribution pattern plays an important role in understanding and estimating of soil C allocation and the effect of crop roots C input on soil carbon balance in agroecosystems. A database of 96 profiles was compiled and root distribution pattern were fitted to a modified logistic dose response curve for 11 temperate crops. A slight linear decrease between the root mass: length distribution ratio and the soil depth was found for monocotyledons while an exponential decrease with depth was found for dicotyledons. These results indicated that roots were thicker at upper soil layers with the effect much larger for dicotyledons. The estimated depth at which 50% of total root was accumulated for different crops varied from 8 cm to 20 cm. Alfalfa (Medicago sativa L.) showed the deepest rooting profile with a fitted maximum rooting depth (dmax) of 177 cm but another perennial, fescue (Festuca arundinacea Shreb.), had the shallowest dmax of 78 cm. In general, cereal and pulse crop roots were distributed more evenly in soil profile while more roots were accumulated in the upper soil layers for oilseed crops. The estimated root distribution patterns from the present study could be incorporated into agroecosystem models for good representations of belowground processes and enhance the accuracy of carbon and water cycling estimation in agroecosystem.
Subfields: Civil and Structural Engineering, Plant Science, Soil Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/39fe952370b8c7421aa9348d5001da73b89e7a6f
How researchers see this paper
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In Plant Science
- Emily E. Wright
- Michael J. Castellano
- Raziel A. Ordóñez
- Rafael A. Martinez-Feria
- Jerry L. Hatfield
- Sotirios V. Archontoulis
In Soil Science
Citations in the corpus
- Root to shoot and carbon to nitrogen ratios of maize and soybean crops in the US Midwest (2020, background): “Knowledge of belowground root traits lags behind knowledge of aboveground plant traits (Laliberté, 2016) because most information about root traits comes from controlled experiments, shallow soil sampling and dated studies (Amos and Walters, 2006; Fan et al., 2016).”