Root traits for infertile soils

Root traits for infertile soils

Crop production is often restricted by the availability of essential mineral elements. For example, the availability of N, P, K, and S limits low-input agriculture, the phytoavailability of Fe, Zn, and Cu limits crop production on alkaline and calcareous soils, and P, Mo, Mg, Ca, and K deficiencies, together with proton, Al and Mn toxicities, limit crop production on acid soils. Since essential...

QTL mapping for maize root system traits

Nonfumigant Nematicides for Control of Root-knot Nematode to Protect Carrot Root Growth in Organic Soils.

Greenhouse tests were conducted to determine the effects of two kinds of Meloidogyne hapla inoculum on the growth and quality of carrot roots, and the protection afforded in each case by nonfumigant nematicides in organic soils. For all treatments the percentage of carrots damaged was greater with larvae alone as inoculum than with larvae and eggs, indicating that most of the damage occurs earl...

Belowground fine root productivity, traits, and trees.

A long-standing debate in plant ecology is how plant diversity – including species richness, functional, and phylogenetic diversity – determines primary productivity aboveground and belowground (Tilman et al., 1997; Cadotte et al., 2009). A leading mechanism linking diversity and productivity posits that diverse assemblages of plants are more likely to complement each other in resource acquirin...

Root Foraging Performance and Life-History Traits

Plants use their roots to forage for nutrients in heterogeneous soil environments, but different plant species vastly differ in the intensity of foraging they perform. This diversity suggests the existence of constraints on foraging at the species level. We therefore examined the relationships between the intensity of root foraging and plant body traits across species in order to estimate the d...