Predicting root biomass with electrical capacitance
As Craig Carlson, a PhD candidate at Cornell University's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, explains, "A majority of electroconductivity studies have focused on annual grasses and hydroponic systems. We wanted to develop a cheap, quick method of measuring root biomass in soils."
Carlson works with Dr. Larry Smart, leader of North America's largest breeding program for shrub willow (Salix spp.), an important biofuel crop. One aspect of their breeding work requires growing up to 400 individual plants in separate pots, and an efficient method to quantify root biomass would allow for rapid selection of individuals with optimal traits to continue breeding. The alternative is to mechanically remove soil to measure root biomass, a method that is both destructive and extremely time consuming.
Despite being initially skeptical that the root electrical capacitance (REC) method would work in soil, Carlson was able to tweak the technique and demonstrate its efficacy in a paper published in a recent issue of Applications in Plant Sciences. Using a relatively simple setup composed of a stem clamp, soil probe, and capacitance meter, this new application of the REC method allows for quick predictions of dry root biomass across a variety of shrub willow species and species hybrids and circumvents the need to meticulously sift through soil to tease apart fine roots for measurements.
Read more at phys.org
