Abstract
As an important organ of absorbing water and nutrients for rice, the cognition and expression of the three-dimensional (3D) morphology of roots has become a bottleneck in-depth study of rice roots due to the observing obstacles of soil. To clarify the morphological and distributional characteristics of rice roots, “root box” experiments are conducted to mensurate three dimensional spatial coordinates and morphological parameters of rice roots at different growth stages. Based on these experiments and the morphological parameters, the initial position of the root node and growth direction of branches are determined, a rice root model is constructed with B-spline curves by analyzing the topological structure of rice roots to quantify the biological characteristics of rice roots and summarize the morphological structure and growth characteristics of rice roots and improve the cubic growth function to describe the growth change in rice roots. Meanwhile, the output accuracy of the model is tested. In addition, dynamic simulation of rice root growth characteristics in 3D space is implemented using Visual C++ and the OpenGL standard graphics library. Analysis results indicate that the average simulated fitness of the total root length, surface area and volume is about 94.82%, 93.86%, and 91.96%, respectively. Therefore, the model can express the morphological characteristics and growth rules of rice roots at different growth stages, which enrich the digitization and visualization methods for roots of other crops.
Highlights
As the ‘‘engine’’ of crop growth, the main function of roots is to absorb the moisture and nutrients needed for plant growth from the surrounding soil [19]
The maximum error between the simulated values and measured values is 3.84%; the minimum error is 0.68%; and the average error value is 1.12%. These findings indicate that the rice root model is able to effectively predict dynamic changes in root length, root area and root volume for rice varieties grown under different conditions
An L-system of rice roots was designed in this study and presented in this paper, and a rice root model based on morphological parameters was constructed by optimizing the cubic growth function and using B-spline curves
Summary
As the ‘‘engine’’ of crop growth, the main function of roots is to absorb the moisture and nutrients needed for plant growth from the surrounding soil [19]. Morphological and physiological indices of crop roots are closely associated with the prophase stage of development of the aboveground parts of roots and with crop output and grain quality in the later stages. Root morphological and physiological characteristics must be optimized to guarantee good crop yields [37]. Approximately 75% of rice crops are cultivated in soils under flood conditions during the growing season [2]; the important parts of the plants are typically submerged making measurement and study difficult [12]. Crop roots do not exhibit the prominent growth characteristics exhibited by main stems and leaves such as nodes.
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