RootVision: Illuminating root diversity under crop mixtures

Expansion of crop land with more diversified plant communities can potentially contribute to more sustainable production of food, feed and energy in the future. However, this requires better understanding on the compatibility of plant species used in crop mixtures, and pairing the right belowground traits is the key to productive and sustainable crop diversification. Current tools do not allow species differentiation without destructive sampling. This makes the study on crop mixtures and their belowground interactions laborious causing the reduction in research scale. Therefore, this project aims to develop a novel root phenotyping tool for species differentiation under crop mixtures by exploiting novel spectroscopy and high throughput multi-trait detection from roots.