الملخص الإنجليزي
Plants are dependent on their root systems for supplying necessary nutrients and water and for providing anchorage. The complicated nature of the root system drives the interest for exploring the root system in-situ. However, the root system is commonly obstructed by the opaque medium in which they grow thus making an objective assessment of its properties that control the plant growth impossible. Accordingly, in order to see the root system as it exists in the soil with no disruption to its formation or to the roots surrounding, a non-disturbing visualizing technique is required.
This study presents the visualization of the plant root system of chickpea using a Computed Tomography (CT) scanner. It focuses on the implementation of the CT scanning technique, combined with computer codes developed in the PV-WAVE programming language, for visualizing, quantifying and studying the different properties of root system non-destructively.
This study showed the potential for investigating root properties of chickpea using the CT scanner. However, a comparison of the morphometric and non destructive visualizations showed some differences, probably due to the resolution of the CT scanner output which was limited to 0.35 mm for one pixel. More precisely, visualization from the isoroot_jo.pro using CT matrices remained incomplete when compared to the actual root system. However, the quantification of the roots was giving the detailed information of the roots. Eighty percent of the root branches were detected by the Branjo.pro computer program and characteristics of each branch was documented. These results are smaller than the actual root lengths. Again, this is attributed to the resolution of the CT scanner.
Additional root properties were estimated and documented using PV-WAVE,
