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Zoom Link Recording

Organized Oral Session

Hybrid Session
Organized Oral Session

OOS 49 - A System Understanding of Plant Roots and Their Global Consequences

Thursday, August 10, 2023
8:00 AM – 9:30 AM PDT
Location: 252

Ever since their emergence some 400 million years ago, plant roots have been powering land biogeochemistry by pumping water and nutrients through terrestrial ecosystems, with extensive impacts on plant nutrition, community assembly, ecosystem functioning, and land carbon sink. Yet, despite the functional importance of plant roots, huge knowledge gaps still exist, especially regarding the functioning of individual roots and the whole rooting systems, largely due to the difficulty of sampling roots and gathering data. Indeed, one of the biggest uncertainties in modeling land vegetation and the Earth system is capturing the belowground processes, in part due to our poor understanding of plant roots.

Recent studies have greatly improved our understanding of plant roots through the study of their “traits”, ranging from morphological traits such as root diameter to root-symbiont relationships such as mycorrhizal colonization rate, thanks to the rise of publicly available harmonized root trait data. However, these trait data mostly reflect micro-scale properties of individual root segments (e.g., root diameter, root nitrogen concentration). A rooting-system level understanding of how these roots are distributed throughout the soil matrix still lags far behind, limiting our ability to scale up local, trait-based measurements to ecosystem-scale properties.

The goal of this proposed session is to bring together researchers who study plant roots from a system perspective, to present their most recent studies and discuss their thoughts and ideas on the future directions of advancing system-level understanding of plant roots and root-mediated processes. Topics include, but are not limited to,
1) What are the factors that shape the form and functions of rooting system (who and who);
2) How to scale up local observations of roots to ecosystem-level understanding (who and who);
3) How to represent rooting system in dynamical vegetation models (who and who);
Answers to all these newly emerged challenges could pave a way to the next-generation research on plant rooting system ecology.

Presentations:

  • 8:00 AM – 8:15 AM PDT
    Root system dimensions and their influence on water and nutrient uptake

    Presenting Author: Robert Jackson – Stanford University

  • 8:15 AM – 8:30 AM PDT
    What are the deepest rooted trees in the world doing down there?

    Presenting Author: Edmund February – University of Cape Town

    Co-author: Klaudia Schactschneider – CSIR

    Co-author: Eleanor Shadwell – University of Cape Town

  • 8:30 AM – 8:45 AM PDT
    Using root traits to predict the consequences of woody encroachment in grassy ecosystems

    Presenting Author: Jesse B. Nippert – Kansas State University Division of Biology

    Co-author: Rachel Keen – Kansas State University

    Co-author: Kim O'Keefe – St. Edward's University

    Co-author: Emmett (Greg) Greg Tooley – Colorado State University Department of Biology

  • 8:45 AM – 9:00 AM PDT
    Contributions of subtropical and tropical species to belowground plant ecological strategies

    Presenting Author: Kelly M. Andersen – Nanyang Technological University

    Co-Author: Nathaly Guerrero-Ramirez – University of Göttingen

    Co-author: Monique Weemstra – Florida International University

    Co-author: Marie Arnaud – Institute of Ecology and Environmental Sciences Paris (iEES-Paris), Sorbonne University

    Co-author: Amanda L. Cordeiro, MS – Colorado State University

    Co-author: Daniela F C usack – Department of Ecosystem Science and Sustainability, Colorado State University

    Co-author: Martyna M. Kotowska – Department of Plant Ecology and Ecosystem Research, University of Goettingen

    Co-author: Ming Yang Lee – College of Science, Nanyang Technological University

    Co-author: Céline Leroy – AMAP, Université de Montpellier, CIRAD, CNRS, INRAE, IRD

    Co-author: Laynara F. Lugli – Coordination of Environmental Dynamics, National Institute of Amazonian Research (INPA)

    Co-author: Kerstin Pierick – Spatial Structures and Digitization of Forests / Silviculture and Forest Ecology of the Temperate Zones, University of Göttingen

    Co-author: Chris M. Smith-Martin – Columbia University

    Co-author: Laura Toro – Department of Plant and Microbial Biology, University of Minnesota

    Co-author: María Natalia Umaña – Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Michigan

    Co-author: Oscar J. Valverde-Barrantes – Florida International University

    Co-author: Michelle Wong – Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies

    Co-author: Claire Fortunel – Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD)

  • 9:00 AM – 9:15 AM PDT
    Wandering roots: how neighborhoods and abiotic factors influence tropical tree root structures

    Presenting Author: Katherine Sinacore – Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute

  • 9:15 AM – 9:30 AM PDT
    Wetland roots: global change responses and greenhouse gas implications

    Presenting Author: Avni Malhotra, Dr – University of Zurich, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory