Imaging local soil kinematics during the first days of maize root growth in sand.

Abstract

Maize seedlings are grown in Hostun sand with two different gradings and two different densities. The root-soil system is imaged daily for the first 8 days of plant growth with X-ray computed tomography. Segmentation, skeletonisation and digital image correlation techniques are used to analyse the evolution of the root system architecture, the displacement fields and the local strain fields due to plant growth in the soil. It is found that root thickness and root length density do not depend on the initial soil configuration. However, the depth of the root tip is strongly influenced by the initial soil density, and the number of laterals is impacted by grain size, which controls pore size, capillary rise and thus root access to water. Consequently, shorter root axes are observed in denser sand and fewer second order roots are observed in coarser sands. In all soil configurations tested, root growth induces shear strain in the soil around the root system, and locally, in the vicinity of the first order roots axis. Root-induced shear is accompanied by dilative volumetric strain close to the root body. Further away, the soil experiences dilation in denser sand and compaction in looser sand. These results suggest that the increase of porosity close to the roots can be caused by a mix of shear strain and steric exclusion.

Plant phenotyping relevance

X線CT画像にセグメンテーション、骨格化、デジタル画像相関を適用し、根系構造や根の形態・成長を定量化する手法が研究の中心であるため。

Code and data availability

The article describes X-ray CT imaging of maize root growth in sand with segmentation, skeletonisation and DIC analysis, but no blocks contain an explicit data or code availability statement, no public repository deposit of the CT volumes, phenotypic measurements, or analysis scripts is named, and no authors' publicURL

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