Root Sensing for Architecture and Uptake Dynamics.

Root development and architecture are important traits that determine the health and overall development of plants from germination to emergence. It is becoming increasingly important for breeders, growers, and farmers to have an idea of root development. For the breeders, it is important to develop cultivars with desired rooting traits that contribute to improved yield, quality, and resource use efficiency. For growers, information about root health, development, and uptake dynamics would provide much needed information about plant development, water and nutrient requirements, and production quality. Therefore, the need for a new, nondestructive, and in situ method for the monitoring of root health, development, and uptake dynamics is critically important. Electrical capacitance tomography (ECT) and electrical resistance tomography (ERT) are both nondestructive and in situ techniques that allow for this desired root monitoring. Relative ECT measurements have been shown to be able to provide: information for root development, insight into speed of root growth, the ability to distinguish healthy developing roots from stunted and dying roots, in situ. ECT was also used for presymptomatic detection in bell pepper plants and stress effects on the roots. ECT has the ability to provide much needed information of root health, speed of root growth, stress effects on rooting properties, and root mass development. ERT has the ability to provide critical information of the root/soil interactions, root/water interactions, and monitoring water distribution within the soil around the roots, providing information about hydraulic redistribution. 3-D ERT would also be able to “show” root distribution and growth metrics of plants. The background and advantages of ERT and ECT are discussed here as well as the results for root health and development experiments performed using ECT. These methods show great promise for the future of root monitoring and measuring uptake dynamics in root systems.