Pot size matters: a meta-analysis of the effects of rooting volume on plant growth.

By Hendrik Poorter, Jonas B Hler, D. van Dusschoten, José Climent, J. Postma. Functional Plant Biology, 2012

713 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The majority of experiments in plant biology use plants grown in some kind of container or pot. We conducted a meta-analysis on 65 studies that analysed the effect of pot size on growth and underlying variables. On average, a doubling of the pot size increased biomass production by 43%. Further analysis of pot size effects on the underlying components of growth suggests that reduced growth in smaller pots is caused mainly by a reduction in photosynthesis per unit leaf area, rather than by changes in leaf morphology or biomass allocation. The appropriate pot size will logically depend on the size of the plants growing in them. Based on various lines of evidence we suggest that an appropriate pot size is one in which the plant biomass does not exceed 1gL-1. In current research practice ~65% of the experiments exceed that threshold. We suggest that researchers need to carefully consider the pot size in their experiments, as small pots may change experimental results and defy the purpose of the experiment.

Subfields: Nature and Landscape Conservation, Plant Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a95f35b36924d0b6b4c96c02c346e4af2b385c2e

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Citations in the corpus

Effects of Soil Organisms on Aboveground Plant-Insect Interactions in the Field: Patterns, Mechanisms and the Role of Methodology (2018, background): “The barrier also inherently limits plant growth (i.e., pot limitation), leading to changes in plant growth and physiology (Poorter et al., 2012), which may either be beneficial or detrimental to insect performance.”
A Review of Imaging Techniques for Plant Phenotyping (2014, background): “Beta vulgaris [86]; Bean [87] Controlled”
Adaptation of wheat, barley, canola, field pea and chickpea to the thermal environments of Australia (2015, background): “Artefacts arising from growing plants in pots have been discussed in detail (Passioura 2002, 2006; Poorter et al. 2012).”
Climate, soil and plant functional types as drivers of global fine‐root trait variation (2017, background): “…implementation of pot studies with prolonged plant development, realistic available rooting volume, soil density, moisture, fertility and micro-organism communities may be necessary to more adequately capture plant traits below-ground in controlled conditions (see also Poorter et al. 2012, 2016).”