Background and Aims The advantages of genotype mixtures on soil water balance are still poorly understood. We aim to determine the impact of soil water conditions (well-watered or chronic water deficit) on the root water uptake (RWU) of two contrasting root genotypes (“shallow root system” SRS and “deep root system” DRS) and their mixture at the booting stage. We conducted a controlled plant-soil column experiment and quantifi...

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...

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...

The article “Imaging plant responses to water deficit using electrical resistivity tomography”, written by Sathyanarayan Rao, Nolwenn Lesparre, Adrián Flores-Orozco, Florian Wagner, Andreas Kemna and Mathieu Javaux, was originally published Online First without Open Access.

The original version of this article unfortunately contained a mistake. The authors would like to add Andreas Kemna as the fifth author of this paper. The updated list of authors as well as the complete affiliation is presented in this correction article.

Background and aims Monitoring root water uptake dynamics under water deficit (WD) conditions in fields are crucial to assess plant drought tolerance. In this study, we investigate the ability of Electrical Resistivity Tomography (ERT) to capture specific soil water depletion induced by root water uptake. Methods A combination of surface and depth electrodes with a high spatial resolution (10 cm) was used to map 2-D changes of...