Aims We aimed at assessing the influence of above- and below-ground environmental conditions over the performance of Centaurea jacea L., a drought-resistant grassland forb species. Methods Transpiration rate, CO 2 assimilation rate, leaf water potential, instantaneous and intrinsic water use efficiency, temperature, relative humidity, vapor pressure deficit and soil water content in one plant and root length density in four pl...

Background and aims Impact of drought on crop growth depends on soil and root hydraulic properties that determine the access of plant roots to soil water. Root hairs may increase the accessible water pool but their effect depends on soil hydraulic properties and adaptions of root systems to drought. These adaptions are difficult to investigate in pot experiments that focus on juvenile plants. Methods A wild-type and its root h...

Aims Root hairs are important for uptake, especially for nutrients with low mobility in soils with high sorption capacity. Mutants with defective root hairs are expected to have lower nutrient uptake, unless they compensate with more root growth. Since root hairs can also contribute to the plant's water uptake their importance could change over the course of a growing season. It was our objective to investigate the role of roo...

Background and aims Characterizing root system architectures of field-grown crops is challenging as root systems are hidden in the soil. We investigate the possibility of estimating root architecture model parameters from soil core data in a Bayesian framework. Methods In a synthetic experiment, we simulated wheat root systems in a virtual field plot with the stochastic CRootBox model. We virtually sampled soil cores from this...

Meaningful assessment of pesticide fate in soils and plants is based on fate models that represent all relevant processes. With mechanistic models, these processes can be simulated based on soil, substance, and plant properties. We present a mechanistic model that simulates pesticide uptake from soil and investigate how it is influenced, depending on the governing uptake process, by root and substance properties and by distrib...

Aims Demonstrating the potential of MRI as a 3D, non-invasive and continuous measurement technique to map Na + concentration distributions in soil and around roots. Methods Dissolved NaCl in soil and soil-plant systems was mapped by 3D 23 Na-MRI. The lower limit of detectability in saturated and unsaturated porous media was evaluated, followed by evaporation experiments to test the quantification. Finally, Na + enrichment arou...