1.18k drawings of plant root systems | Hacker News Reader

1.18k drawings of plant root systems

images.wur.nl

345 pointsbookofjoe71 comments

Absolutely fascinating stuff, love it!

If you're doing any kind of gardening, you can find the root system of many common plants and weeds. Some examples:

- bindweed: https://images.wur.nl/digital/collection/coll13/id/193/rec/1 the white meaty rhizomes go at about 10 cm but the actual roots can go much much deeper (2.2 meters in this example)

- horsetail: https://images.wur.nl/digital/collection/coll13/id/753/rec/1 also grows deep roots; extremely sturdy - resists many herbicides and can spread through spores.

- goutweed: https://images.wur.nl/digital/collection/coll13/id/1435/rec/... dense network of thin roots

- dandelion: https://images.wur.nl/digital/collection/coll13/id/676/rec/2 this example has roots reaching 4.5 meters!

- potato: https://images.wur.nl/digital/collection/coll13/id/1014/rec/... was looking for a tomato plant but found this instead (they are the same genus); you can see the tubers too.

- carrot: https://images.wur.nl/digital/collection/coll13/id/1049/rec/... the edible taproot is not the only part

Bejeezus how do I unsee the bindweed one!? No wonder it takes so much time to keep it at bay.

The dandelion root is 450 cm?! That explains why pulling up the sprouts does nothing to prevent it from sprouting again.

they're amazing, you can make salad with lemon and salt, or fry in butter and eat with your steak. Also the roots are edible. And dandelion pulls nutrients for other plants from below, once the nutrients have been used up, the dandy will leave on its own.

To add to what aszantu said: plants with deep roots can be very healthy for a garden because they essentially draw nutrients that have soaked deeper into the soil back up. So one way of looking at them is that they are basically mining soil nutrients from below for your garden for free. Perhaps that will make repeatedly mulching them a less frustrating task.

Also, while there are of course legitimate reasons to consider certain plants weeds (e.g. they maybe be poisonous, toxic, or displace other plants that you like more), dandelions are mainly the victim of marketing from pesticide manufacturers half a century ago.

Those are extreme examples, most probably in sand or a loose mix. Roots need oxygen also so can grow a lot in this conditions as long as they are watered.

Most dandelions live in heavy clay. There will be much shorter, reaching just the phreatic level.

This was an extreme example that I found in this collection. Here's something more common (20 cm): https://images.wur.nl/digital/collection/coll13/id/576/rec/1

But there was also a specimen with over 2 meters: https://images.wur.nl/digital/collection/coll13/id/550/rec/3

It varies, but yeah, they are surprisingly deep.

Thanks for links to some of the more interesting ones.

This could be useful for understanding compatibility of plants below ground. The dandelion for example seems totally innocuous, whereas goutweed leaves no space for others.

A massive effort led by Herr Dipl. -Ing Dr. Erwin Lichtenegger going from 1960 up till 2009 was what I looked at. Was interested for a while to get these into a 3D format but never got a reply from the library or the Pflanzensoziologisches Institute. I think these would look great animated and can only wonder what the good doctor would have achieved archiving with today's tools. Effort and dedication like that applied over time is a rare thing I am glad they are well preserved as works of art as much as science.

Ps also the workbooks of Dr. Santiago Ramon y Cajal on brain neurons are museum quality pieces with some startling similarities to these roots from a distance.

Shame that the book is over 200€

The significant digits in that title a killing me. They’ve really gone out of their just to obscure the final digit.

they should have just given the full number (1,18x) or rounded to the hundreds (1.2k)

1.18k is more characters than 1180. Who came up with this title?

But not more characters than 1,180

Originally, there were 1030 drawings. So it was titled 1k.

Then, 110 drawings were added. The title needed to change, so it was titled 1.1k.

Then, 42 drawings were added. The title needed to change, so it was titled 1.18k.

In 2 weeks, 6 more drawings will be added. The title will need to change, and this can be resubmitted as 1.188k.

RIP my friend. Good thing you found the energy to warn us before dieing. By the way, your first sentence is missing a verb. Your second sentence is missing the word "way". Your third sentence should end with a period and the first word should be capitalized. I hope you can still use your last breaths to correct these mistakes. We must give our everything to avoid further casulties in future generations.

Is dieing a correct word? Should it not be dying? :)

Nit: casualties

It's "R.I.P.", not "RIP".

it's not about mistakes, it's about style over substance

USDA Pomological Collection is another set if you want to see the fruiting bodies.

https://search.nal.usda.gov/discovery/collectionDiscovery?vi...

How were these drawings made? It seems the only accurate way would be to painstakingly excavate soil around the root systems a few tiny clumps at a time so as to record how the root system really is shaped prior to any disturbance. This would mean slowly observing the root system from shallower to deeper levels, then reconstructing the side views seen in the drawings.

Growing the plants in some sort of 2D glass observation vessel in order to observe the roots from the side would cause the roots to grow more unusually than in nature.

Very curious how these were done.

Funny, 1.18k is more characters than 1180 and usually I think of using the k form for less approximate values, e.g. 1k

1.18k implies +/- 5, whereas 1180 implies exactly 1180. Maybe the count isn't precise, or is changing?

If I remember my high school math “1180.” with the decimal implies exactly 1180

“1180” without the decimal implies only 3 significant digits.

nobody adds the decimal digit to integers, though

1180 can be 4 significant digits if the count is precise

Nobody really uses 1.18k outside of math, engineering, and scientific contexts either.

A kagi or Google search for 1.18k in quotes returns this very HN thread and mostly a bunch of resistors, very few organic uses (some youtube videos about subscriber counts is all I see).

Never heard of such notation.

For me ≈1180 would mean that it's not exactly 1180.

But a better title would be something like “Over a thousand plant root system drawings”.

where did you go to high school?

If it were to imply an interval, then it would be [1175, 1185).

In EE this problem doesn't exist, it's 1k18.

interestingly, in Chinese you would say 1k1h8 when pronouncing the numbers

But then they have that annoying rule about saying a "zero" when there is a 0 for a magnitude between non-zero digits, for example 108 is one-hundred-zero-eight.

That's because in Chinese it's the higher digit having priority in emissions - if you don't specify zero the it means 180

Yeah that is weird. Because usually a "十" would mark the ten-count anyway, so saying a single digit could only be the ones-count, but they interpret it then differently to mean 80, even if you do not say "十". To me this is not logical and is unintuitive.

It's actually much easier

When people say in English one hundred thousand one thousand and ten, you will need to visualize the digits

101,010

But in Chinese you say 10 * 10^4, 1 * 10^3, 0, 1 * 10

the zero helps you write a zero after the second one without making a mistake

And then people think root cause analysis means finding the one root cause.

These are amazing and very informative. There is an important caveat to consider: how roots actually grow depends a lot on the soil. Sand or clay, moisture and especially if and where there is compaction has a huge impact. A lot of root systems can't even penetrate heavily compacted soil, so you can imagine there is a lot of variability.

In a way this reminds me of the neuron cell trace database from the Allen Brain Atlas...

https://celltypes.brain-map.org/data

Great way to view what is normally hidden, really makes me appreciate plants.

Wow, these are astonishing. The trees have much shallower roots than I thought. I assumed they went down as deep as the tree is tall! And the smaller plants have much deeper roots than I thought.

And much wider that most people think. Generally the roots of trees are 1,5x to 2x the crown.

Roots need oxygen, going more than a few meters down in the soil and conditions aren't very beneficial anymore. Most of the soil life (and nutrients) are in the top few inches.

Yes, also wider! Do the smaller plants only look like they have longer roots because they're going to about the same absolute depth?

Wish they the images was available at even higher resolution. The highest resolution is decent, but not close to fully sharp in the details.

Somewhere an AI is pumping it's fists in excitement

I'm a human pumping my fists in excitement on AI's behalf

Project idea for someone sufficiently motivated: Some of the drawings show rhizomes in root systems, but I don't see a way to search for that.

search for any known plant w/ rhizobia symbiosis

Rhizomes are underground plant stems that propagate a plant, different than rhizobia which are root symbionts of plants.

Imagine how much digging went into drawing those pictures

It's fairly amazing the amount of labor that went into projects in the past.

Now as the value of someone's time went up, it feels not economically feasible to do these anymore.

> economically feasible

Luckily it's a University project. And economic feasibility does not apply.

Or should not. Unfortunately some universities do take this into consideration, rather than just scientific value.

Not to mention that half of the people doing the projects, at least in Britain, were rentier aristocrats who didn't need to work

The Baumol effect [1] all over again, I'm thinking about it more and more lately.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect

How was this captured? I mean they are just drawing but they seem relativly new.

I'd kinda guess they were lab grown with some sort of imaging on the 2 sides, but they are 2d drawings.

Did they really dig them up and and map them out... Maybe water them with a fluorescent dye to get depth info...

Super curious.

They're pen drawings, done by hand. Most of the history of Botany was done this way - Drawings by skilled artists, using life samples painstakingly removed from the soil, as was most of the history of biology and physiology.

You can grow plants specifically for this purpose, using less dense soil so that you can more easily extract the root system without damaging it.

Imagine the patience required, first to wait years until the roots are established, then painstakingly unearth them.

Wouldn't the soil density affect the root system?

Yes. There aren't two root systems identical. I assume that this plants were cultured in a sandy or hydroponic mix.

But the main goal is the generalization and to know how long roots can grow. For trees they wanted to know also if roots can grow up the hill against gravity (they do it all the time). This is useful to understand how stable is the structure and how useful to fix soil in place and fix erosion processes.

The dune melon root is particularly funny. You can almost hear the root sniffing water right and left in the Namibian desert

My initial ideas were injecting the tree with a chemical and zapping it with radar, and growing it hydroponically in translucent gravel. But this seems wildly impractical.

They probably just have a team of students dig them up with a brush, one layer of soil at a time.

I imagine that too. How would you map the root system of a tree. Can’t grow a tree in the lab.

(Someone’s gonna reply with a link where someone grew a tree in a lab but you know what I mean)

https://www.ediblegeography.com/rootstock-archaeology/

There's some detail here about how British researchers developed apple tree rootstocks, including photos of whole trees that have been excavated and reassembled.

Couple it with this documentary:

https://docuwiki.net/index.php?title=Apples:_British_to_the_...

There's a computerphile video [0] that looks at one way people take 3d x-rays to look at plant roots (I haven't re-watched it yet so unsure if it's related to the article)

Edit: Look at about 6:50 in the video for a render of a root system.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qrl__J4vYok

With the gravel thing, you wouldn't necessarily even get the same structure as in the wild. Plants can grow to fit their surroundings.

Aren't all the drawings just one 2d slice? You would just have to cut the soil in a line through the plant with a sharp spade and remove enough on one side to make the drawing.

In gravel won't work, as the structure of the ground has a high impact on the shape of roots.

As I can confirm, trying to grow carrots in heavy clay ground for example.

Yeah, the methodology here is bothering me. Did they really dig 4m+ deep? Must be really hard work, but impressive nevertheless. Maybe they did use some water spades to ease up the digging?

Too bad it does not contain any of the grape (genus Vitis) varieties.

As above, so below, as below so above

Is this available as a dataset?

Why 1.18k and not 1180?

1k18

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