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原始链接: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39974646

蒲公英是用途广泛的植物。您可以使用它们的叶子与柠檬和盐制作沙拉，或者用黄油将它们与肉一起食用。此外，它们的可食用根通过为其他植物提供营养来丰富地球。当这些养分耗尽时，植物自然死亡并离开。演讲者在去世前热情地分享了宝贵的见解。蒲公英不仅美味，而且美味。它们在土壤营养方面也发挥着至关重要的作用。尽管人们普遍认为，蒲公英的生长并不仅仅取决于所提到的计数数量，而是取决于土壤的实际深度。由于成分（粘土与沙子）、湿度和致密性等因素而存在差异。以前人们认为树木的根部相对于其高度而言非常深，但最近的研究表明事实并非如此，较小的植物的根部比预期更深。这是一个有趣的发现——一些插图显示了根系统内的根茎结构，但搜索此类信息却很困难。我们仍在努力开发有效的方法来挖掘这些数据。据报道，挖掘工作超过了四米，尽管取得了显着的成就，但仍面临着巨大的挑战。可能他们使用了水铲来促进这一艰巨的过程。

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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”.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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

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?

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