Nature and Gardening

6657 readers

1 users here now

All things green, outdoors, and nature-y. Whether it's animals in their natural habitat, hiking trails and mountains, or planting a little garden for yourself (and everything in between), you can talk about it here.

See also our Environment community, which is focused on weather, climate, climate change, and stuff like that.

(It's not mandatory, but we also encourage providing a description of your image(s) for accessibility purposes! See here for a more detailed explanation and advice on how best to do this.)

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

1.18k drawings of plant root systems (images.wur.nl)

submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by LallyLuckFarm to c/greenspace

4 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] LallyLuckFarm 5 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Here's what Wageningen University has to say about this collection:

This collection holds 1,180 drawings, the outcome of 40 years of root system excavations in Europe, mainly in Austria. The drawings, their analysis and description were done by Univ. Prof. Dr. Erwin Lichtenegger (1928-2004) and Univ. Prof. Dr. Lore Kutschera (1917-2008) *, leader of Pflanzensoziologisches Institut, Klagenfurt, (now in Bad Goisern, Austria).

Their work led to a number of publications, and is a counterpart to the work by John E. Weaver in Nebraska, USA. These scans of the original drawings, made by Univ.-Prof. Dr. E. Lichtenegger (d. 2004), cover not only a wide variety of species ranging from agricultural crops to associated weeds, but also natural vegetation, from orchids to alpine shrubs and trees. The drawings represent rooting systems of individual species carefully isolated from their environment, and drawn in fine detail.

This image shows one of the teams doing the excavation and measurements on site.

[–] flora_explora 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Wow, this is really impressive!! Thanks :)

I have tried digging up just a bit of some plant roots for an experiment once and it was just so much work! Can't imagine how much effort this must have been for everyone involved :O

[–] LallyLuckFarm 3 points 7 months ago

My pleasure! I finally have a stable Internet connection again to load the source pages