Root phenotyping and root water uptake calculation using soil water contents measured in a winter wheat field

Summary

Non-destructive phenotyping of roots and measurement of root water uptake from different soil layers in the field are vital for improving water management and facilitating the development of drought-resistant crop varieties, but difficult because of their opaqueness. As a result, indirect methods using easy-to-measure variables such as soil water content have been used as alternatives. However, the inherent measurement errors could undermine the robustness and reliability of these methods. This paper proposes a new method to bridge this knowledge gap by using soil water content profiles measured at two time points to calculate root uptake and root-length density. It is based on the Richards' equation by treating root uptake from different soil layers between the two time points as random u