Pepper plant roots stained to study carbon mitigation strategies (IMAGE)
Caption
How do plant roots store carbon? Princeton researchers found that the energy a plant devotes to its roots depends on proximity to other plants: when close together, plants heavily invest in their root systems to compete for finite underground resources; if far apart, they invest less. As about a third of the world's vegetation biomass (and carbon) is belowground, this model provides a valuable tool to predict root proliferation in global earth-system models. The pepper plants were grown in a greenhouse at the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales (CSIC) in Madrid to investigate how their belowground behavior differed when planted alone or alongside a neighbor. The roots of neighboring pepper plants were stained different colors (by injection) to distinguish which roots belonged to which plant.
Credit
Ciro Cabal, Princeton University
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