The identification of plant functional traits that can be linked to ecosystem processes is of wide interest, especially for predicting vegetational responses to climate change. Root diameter of the finest absorptive roots may be one plant trait that has wide significance. Do species with relatively thick absorptive roots forage in nutrient-rich patches differently from species with relatively f...

Longleaf pine (Pinus palustris) seedlings were cultured with air lateral root pruning (side-vented containers, VT) or without (solid-walled containers, SW). Seedling root system morphology and growth were assessed before planting and 8 and 14 months after planting. Although VT seedlings had greater root collar diameter than the SW before planting, seedling height and ground line diameter were n...

Understanding the root distribution of trees by soil coring is time -: consuming as it requires the separation of roots from soil and classification of roots into particular size classes. This labour-intensive process can limit sample throughput and therefore sampling intensity. We investigated the use of quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) on soil DNA extractions to determine live fi...

We examine the height growth, diameter growth and below-ground allocation responses of mountain beech (Nothofagus solandri var. cliffortioides) seedlings to the experimental removal of root competition through root trenching and the addition of fertiliser within relatively intact-canopied mountain beech forest in the Craigieburn Range, Canterbury. Trenching and trenching combined with fertilise...

We used genotypes from six microsatellite loci and demographic data from a large mapped forest plot to study changes in spatial genetic structure across demographic stages, from seed rain to seedlings, juveniles, and adult diameter classes in the Neotropical tree, Jacaranda copaia. In pairwise comparisons of genetic differentiation among demographic classes, only seedlings were significantly di...

In order to quantitatively analyze plant root growth and construct plant root growth model, a root system representation model based on tree-form data structure is proposed in this paper. After processing and analyzing root image, the information of root, such as length, diameter, number of child root, position of child root, angle of child root etc., is stored in a node of this treeform data s...

Precise estimation of root biomass is important for understanding carbon stocks and dynamics in forests. Traditionally, biomass estimates are based on allometric scaling relationships between stem diameter and coarse root biomass calculated using linear regression (LR) on log-transformed data. Recently, it has been suggested that nonlinear regression (NLR) is a preferable fitting method for sca...

OBJECTIVE To construct an adjusted nomogram for the echocardiographic screening of aortic root diameter in children with possible Marfan disease. DESIGN In 91 children (42 boys, 49 girls, age range 3.2 to 18.4 years) undergoing Marfan screening from 1983 until 1996, the diagnosis Marfan syndrome and any other aortic pathology was definitely ruled out. These served as a control population to s...

OBJECTIVE Pulse pressure (PP), a strong predictor of cardiovascular events in type 2 diabetes, is a composite measure affected by several hemodynamic factors. Little is known about the hemodynamic determinants of central PP in type 2 diabetes or whether abnormalities in central pulsatile hemodynamics are already present in individuals with impaired fasting glucose (IFG). In a population-based s...