Publications related to Root | EPFL Graph Search

Tree water uptake patterns across the globe

Plant water uptake from the soil is a crucial element of the global hydrological cycle and essential for vegetation drought resilience. Yet, knowledge of how the distribution of water uptake depth (WUD) varies across species, climates, and seasons is scarc ...

Wiley2024

Mechanistic 2D flow-erosion modelling of vegetated river banks

Giovanni De Cesare, Paolo Perona, Massimiliano Schwarz

We present a simple, vertically-explicit 2D model of river bank erosion that also takes the effect of sediment stabilization by plant roots into account. The model is solved in quasi-analytical form for an exemplary non-stationary hydrograph temporal signa ...

2023

Lignin, from biomass waste to sustainable materials for food packaging, antiviral coatings and agriculture

Alice Boarino

Our planet has been challenged for years by our reckless use of fossil fuels, which has led to the ongoing climate change and energy crisis. The transition to the use of renewable alternative sources has now became urgent and inevitable. The valorization o ...

EPFL2023

Nutrient Availability Does Not Affect Community Assembly in Root-Associated Fungi but Determines Fungal Effects on Plant Growth

Florian Frédéric Vincent Breider, Bing Bai

Nonmycorrhizal root-colonizing fungi are key determinants of plant growth, driving processes ranging from pathogenesis to stress alleviation. Evidence suggests that they might also facilitate host access to soil nutrients in a mycorrhiza-like manner, but t ...

2022

Tree root distribution modelling in different environmental conditions

David Andrew Barry, Paolo Perona, Massimiliano Schwarz

The ability to predict the spatial distribution of tree root system variables (e.g., the Root system Area (RA), the maximum root diameter, the number of roots in diameter classes, the density of fine roots, etc.) under different environmental conditions is ...

2022

Mechanical performance and upscaling of bio-improved soils

Ray Harran

Ecological awareness, pressing climate considerations and rising need for soil stabilization push forward the quest for alternative solutions in geotechnical engineering such as Microbially Induced Carbonate Precipitation (MICP). Precipitated crystals serv ...

EPFL2022

Improved framework to estimate travel time and derived distributions in hydrological control volumes

Mitra Asadollahi

Crossing properties of soil saturation, defined as the duration and excursion of soil saturation below and above certain thresholds, are key variables to ecosystem functioning and evolution by primarily influencing the plant and soil microbes physiological ...

EPFL2022

Phloem water isotopically different to xylem water: Potential causes and implications for ecohydrological tracing

Andrea Rinaldo, Paolo Benettin

The stable isotopes of hydrogen and oxygen in xylem water are often used to investigate tree water sources. But this traditional approach does not acknowledge the contribution of water stored in the phloem to transpiration and how this may affect xylem wat ...

WILEY2022

Conditions for the emergence of circumnutations in plant roots

Dario Floreano, Ilya Loshchilov

The plant root system shows remarkably complex behaviors driven by environmental cues and internal dynamics, whose interplay remains largely unknown. A notable example is circumnutation growth movements, which are growth oscillations from side to side of t ...

2021

Phenotypic plasticity versus ecotypic differentiation under recurrent summer drought in two drought-tolerant pine species

Christoph Bachofen

Despite worldwide reports of high tree mortality, growing evidence indicates that many tree species are well adapted to survive repeated dry spells. The drought resilience of trees is related to their phenotypic plasticity and ecotypic differentiation. Whe ...

WILEY2021

Root carbon and nutrient homeostasis determines downy oak sapling survival and recovery from drought

Leonie Corine Schönbeck

The role of carbon (C) and nutrient uptake, allocation, storage and especially their interactions in survival and recovery of trees under increased frequencies and intensities of drought events is not well understood. A full factorial experiment with four ...

2021

Tree water deficit and dynamic source water partitioning

Andrea Rinaldo, Paolo Benettin, Mitra Asadollahi

The stable isotopes of hydrogen and oxygen (delta H-2 and delta O-18, respectively) have been widely used to investigate tree water source partitioning. These tracers have shed new light on patterns of tree water use in time and space. However, there are s ...

WILEY2020

The response of stomatal conductance to seasonal drought in tropical forests

Charlotte Grossiord, Jin Wu

Stomata regulate CO2 uptake for photosynthesis and water loss through transpiration. The approaches used to represent stomatal conductance (g s) in models vary. In particular, current understanding of drivers of the variation in a key parameter in those mo ...

2020

Plant and root‐zone water isotopes are difficult to measure, explain, and predict: some practical recommendations for determining plant water sources

Charlotte Grossiord, Jana Freiin von Freyberg

Stable isotope ratios of water (𝛿 18O,𝛿 2H) have long been used to study a core question in plant ecology and ecohydrology: “From where do plants take up water?” Indeed, decades of research has involved sampling potential plant water sources in the subsurf ...

2020

Composition and superposition of alluvial deposits drive macro-biological soil engineering and organic matter dynamics in floodplains

Claire Guenat, Pascal Turberg, Rodolphe Schlaepfer, Renée-Claire Le Bayon, Andreas Cedric Schomburg

Soil structure formation in alluvial soils is a fundamental process in near-natural floodplains. A stable soil structure is essential for many ecosystem services and helps to prevent river bank erosion. Plants and earthworms are successful soil engineering ...

2019

Stoichiometric N:P flexibility and mycorrhizal symbiosis favour plant resistance against drought

Pierre Rémi Mariotte

Drought induces changes in the nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) cycle but most plant species have limited flexibility to take up nutrients under such variable or unbalanced N and P availability. Both the degree of flexibility in plant N:P ratio and of ro ...

Wiley2017

Impacts of regional climatic fluctuations on radial growth of Siberian and Scots pine at Mukhrino mire (central-western Siberia)

Luca Bragazza, Guillaume Blanchet, Baptiste Calliari

Ring width (TRW) chronologies from Siberian (Pinus sibirica) and Scots (Pinus sylvestris) pine trees were sampled at Mukhrino - a large mire complex in central-western Siberia - to evaluate the impacts of hydroclimatic variability on tree growth over the l ...

Elsevier Science Bv2017

Interaction of compost additives with phosphate solubilizing rhizobacteria improved maize production and soil biochemical properties under dryland agriculture

Alexandre Buttler, Luca Bragazza, Bjorn Jozef Maria Robroek, Muhammad Saleem Arif, Muhammad Riaz, Muhammad Ashraf

Dry land soils from the Indo-Gangetic plains are inherently poor in organic matter content and phosphorus (P). Amendment of these soils with P-enriched compost, together with P solubilizing rhizobacterial (PSR) inoculation has been suggested to improve pla ...

Elsevier2017

Determining the Surface Structure of Silicated Alumina Catalysts via Isotopic Enrichment and Dynamic Nuclear Polarization Surface-Enhanced NMR Spectroscopy

David Lyndon Emsley, Brennan James Walder, Jasmine Viger-Gravel

Isotopic enrichment of Si-29 and DNP-enhanced NMR spectroscopy are combined to determine the detailed surface structure of a silicated alumina catalyst. The significant sensitivity enhancement provided by DNP is vital to the acquisition of multinuclear and ...

American Chemical Society2017

Environmental drivers of carbon and nitrogen isotopic signatures in peatland vascular plants along an altitude gradient

Alexandre Buttler, Konstantin Svetlozarov Gavazov, Luca Bragazza

Peatlands are important sinks of atmospheric carbon (C) that, in response to climate warming, are undergoing dynamic vegetation succession. Here we examined the hypothesis that the uptake of nutrients by different plant growth forms (PGFs) is one key mecha ...

Springer2016