Jan Vanderborght

Jan Vanderborght
Forschungszentrum Jülich · Institute of Bio- and Geosciences (IBG)

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425
Publications
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Publications

Publications (425)
Preprint
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The global supply of phosphorus is decreasing. At the same time, climate change reduces the water availability in most regions of the world. Insights on how decreasing phosphorus availability influences plant architecture is crucial to understand its influence on plant functional properties, such as the root system's water uptake capacity. In this...
Article
Full-text available
The two‐term infiltration equation is commonly used to determine the sorptivity, , and product, , of the dimensionless multiple and saturated soil hydraulic conductivity from cumulative vertical infiltration measurements (L) at times (T). This reduced form of the quasi‐analytical power series solution of Richardson's equation of Philip enjoys a sol...
Preprint
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Drought is a serious constraint to crop growth and production of important staple crops such as maize. Improved understanding of the responses of crops to drought can be incorporated into cropping system models to support crop breeding, varietal selection and management decisions for minimizing negative impacts. We investigate the impacts of differ...
Article
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When estimating field‐scale average soil moisture from sensors measuring at fixed positions, spatial variability in soil moisture leads to “measurement errors” of the spatial mean, which may persist over time due to persistent soil moisture patterns resulting in autocorrelated measurement errors. The uncertainty of parameters that are derived from...
Preprint
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Root hydraulic properties are key physiological traits that determine the capacity of root systems to take up water, at a specific evaporative demand. They can strongly vary among species, cultivars or even within the same genotype, but a systematic analysis of their variation across plant functional types (PFTs) is still missing. Here, we reviewed...
Article
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Non‐invasive imaging of processes within the soil–plant continuum, particularly root and soil water distributions, can help optimize agricultural practices such as irrigation and fertilization. In this study, in‐situ time‐lapse horizontal crosshole ground penetrating radar (GPR) measurements and root images were collected over three maize crop grow...
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The production of crops secure the human food supply, but climate change is bringing new challenges. Dynamic plant growth and corresponding environmental data are required to uncover phenotypic crop responses to the changing environment. There are many datasets on above-ground organs of crops, but roots and the surrounding soil are rarely the subje...
Article
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Plant growth and development involve the integration of numerous processes, influenced by both endogenous and exogenous factors. At any given time during a plant’s life cycle, the plant architecture is a readout of this continuous integration. However, untangling the individual factors and processes involved in the plant development and quantifying...
Article
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The effect of root hairs on water uptake remains controversial. In particular, the key root hair and soil parameters that determine their importance have been elusive. We grew maize plants (Zea mays) in microcosms and scanned them using synchrotron‐based X‐ray computed microtomography. By means of image‐based modelling, we investigated the paramete...
Article
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Plant water uptake and plant and soil water status are important for the soil water balance and plant growth. They depend on atmospheric water demand and the accessibility of soil water to plant roots, which is in turn related to the hydraulic properties of the root system and the soil around root segments. We present a simulation model that descri...
Article
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Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is used to image root systems grown in opaque soil. However, reconstruction of root system architecture (RSA) from 3-dimensional (3D) MRI images is challenging. Low resolution and poor contrast-to-noise ratios (CNRs) hinder automated reconstruction. Hence, manual reconstruction is still widely used. Here, we evaluat...
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A plant’s development is strongly linked to the water and carbon flows in the soil-plant-atmosphere continuum. Expected climate shifts will alter the water and carbon cycles and will affect plant phenotypes. Comprehensive models which simulate mechanistically and dynamically the feedback loops between a plant’s three-dimensional development and the...
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Despite previous reports on European growing seasons lengthening due to global warming, evidence shows that this trend has been reversing in the past decade due to increased transpiration needs. To asses this, we used an innovative method along with space-based observations to determine the timing of greening and dormancy and then to determine exis...
Article
Soil records information about past environmental and ecological conditions, yet little is known about mechanisms of memory, transmission of information across space and time, and potential consequences for ecosystem functioning. More systematic inclusion of soil memory in Earth system models can account for complex land surface responses to distur...
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Functional-structural root architecture models have evolved as tools for the design of improved agricultural management practices and for the selection of optimal root traits. In order to test their accuracy and reliability, we present the first benchmarking of root water uptake from soil using five well-established functional-structural root archi...
Article
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In the context of the repeated droughts that have affected central Europe over the last years (2018–2020, 2022), climate-resilient management of water resources, based on timely information about the current state of the terrestrial water cycle and forecasts of its evolution, has gained an increasing importance. To achieve this, we propose a new se...
Preprint
Full-text available
A plant's development is strongly linked to the water and carbon flows in the soil-plant-atmosphere continuum. Expected climate shifts will alter the water and carbon cycles and affect plant phenotypes. Comprehensive models which simulate mechanistically and dynamically the feedback loops between a plant's three-dimensional development and the wate...
Preprint
Full-text available
Although it has been shown that climate warming has steadily increased the length of the growing season (LGS) in Europe, we present new evidence that this trend reversed during last decade. Warmer European winter and spring weather combined with adequate soil moisture still results in early greening, albeit at slower rates than in the past. However...
Preprint
Full-text available
Plant growth and development involve the integration of numerous processes, influenced by both endogenous and exogenous factors. At any given time during a plant’s life cycle, the plant architecture is a readout of this continuous integration. However, untangling the individual factors and processes involved in the plant development and quantifying...
Article
Full-text available
Aims We aimed at assessing the influence of above- and below-ground environmental conditions over the performance of Centaurea jacea L., a drought-resistant grassland forb species. Methods Transpiration rate, CO2 assimilation rate, leaf water potential, instantaneous and intrinsic water use efficiency, temperature, relative humidity, vapor pressur...
Article
Full-text available
Background and aims Impact of drought on crop growth depends on soil and root hydraulic properties that determine the access of plant roots to soil water. Root hairs may increase the accessible water pool but their effect depends on soil hydraulic properties and adaptions of root systems to drought. These adaptions are difficult to investigate in p...
Article
Full-text available
Soil hydrological processes (SHP) support ecosystems, modulate the impact of climate change on terrestrial systems and control feedback mechanisms between water, energy and biogeochemical cycles. However, land-use changes and extreme events are increasingly impacting these processes. In this Review, we describe SHP across scales and examine their l...
Article
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Root systems of crops play a significant role in agroecosystems. The root system is essential for water and nutrient uptake, plant stability, symbiosis with microbes, and a good soil structure. Minirhizotrons have shown to be effective to noninvasively investigate the root system. Root traits, like root length, can therefore be obtained throughout...
Article
Full-text available
In his seminal paper on the solution of the infiltration equation, Philip (1969), https://doi.org/10.1016/b978-1-4831-9936-8.50010-6 proposed a gravity time, tgrav, to estimate practical convergence time and the time domain validity of his infinite time series expansion, TSE, for describing the transient state. The parameter tgrav refers to a point...
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Crop model intercomparison studies have mostly focused on the assessment of predictive capabilities for crop development using weather and basic soil data from the same location. Still challenging is the model performance when considering complex interrelations between soil and crop dynamics under a changing climate. The objective of this study was...
Article
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Imaging subsurface small‐scale features and monitoring transport of tracer plumes at a fine resolution is of interest to characterize transport processes in aquifers. Full‐waveform inversion (FWI) of crosshole ground penetrating radar (GPR) measurements enables aquifer characterization at decimeter‐scale resolution. The method produces images of bo...
Article
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Aims Root hairs are important for uptake, especially for nutrients with low mobility in soils with high sorption capacity. Mutants with defective root hairs are expected to have lower nutrient uptake, unless they compensate with more root growth. Since root hairs can also contribute to the plant's water uptake their importance could change over the...
Preprint
Full-text available
Background and aims: Impact of drought on crop growth depends on soil and root hydraulic properties that determine the acces of plant roots to soil water. Root hairs may increase the accessible water pool but their effect depends on soil hydraulic properties and adaptions of root systems to drought. These adaptions are difficult to investigate in p...
Article
Full-text available
Tropical peatlands are among the most carbon-dense ecosystems on Earth, and their water storage dynamics strongly control these carbon stocks. The hydrological functioning of tropical peatlands differs from that of northern peatlands, which has not yet been accounted for in global land surface models (LSMs). Here, we integrated tropical peat-specific...
Article
Full-text available
Soil hydraulic conductivity (ksoil) drops significantly in dry soils, resulting in steep soil water potential gradients (ψs) near plant roots during water uptake. Coarse soil grid resolutions in root system scale (RSS) models of root water uptake (RWU) generally do not spatially resolve this gradient in drying soils which can lead to a large overes...
Article
Full-text available
Purpose Simultaneously interacting rhizosphere processes determine emergent plant behaviour, including growth, transpiration, nutrient uptake, soil carbon storage and transformation by microorganisms. However, these processes occur on multiple scales, challenging modelling of rhizosphere and plant behaviour. Current advances in modelling and experi...
Article
Full-text available
Many different equations have been proposed to describe quantitatively one‐dimensional soil water infiltration. The unknown coefficients of these equations characterize soil hydraulic properties and may be estimated from a n record, {t∼i,I∼i}i=1n$\{ {\tilde t_i},{\tilde I_i}\} _{i = 1}^n$, of cumulative infiltration measurements using curve fitting...
Chapter
In this chapter, we discuss the issue of balance between spatial resolution and computational efficiency in the context of the R-SWMS model. Based on the equations governing the water fluxes within the model, we propose here an objective and quantitative criterion which can help fix root segment size to both minimize computational load and achieve...
Chapter
In this chapter, we present the Root and Soil Water Movement and Solute transport model R-SWMS, which can be used to simulate flow and transport in the soil–plant system. The equations describing water flow in soil–root systems are presented and numerical solutions are provided. An application of R-SWMS is then briefly discussed, in which we combin...
Preprint
Full-text available
Root systems of crops play a significant role in agro-ecosystems. The root system is essential for water and nutrient uptake, plant stability, symbiosis with microbes and a good soil structure. Minirhizotrons, consisting of transparent tubes that create windows into the soil, have shown to be effective to non-invasively investigate the root system....
Article
Full-text available
Land use and land cover changes (LUCC) can drastically alter various components of the critical zone, including soil thickness and soil chemical weathering processes. Often these studies, however, tend to focus on extreme cases, not representing what actually happens on average at larger, regional scales. Here, we evaluate the impact of LUCC on soi...
Article
Full-text available
Meaningful assessment of pesticide fate in soils and plants is based on fate models that represent all relevant processes. With mechanistic models, these processes can be simulated based on soil, substance, and plant properties. We present a mechanistic model that simulates pesticide uptake from soil and investigate how it is influenced, depending...
Article
Full-text available
Background and aims Characterizing root system architectures of field-grown crops is challenging as root systems are hidden in the soil. We investigate the possibility of estimating root architecture model parameters from soil core data in a Bayesian framework. Methods In a synthetic experiment, we simulated wheat root systems in a virtual field p...
Article
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In this study, we developed a novel model approach to compute the spatio-temporal distribution patterns of rhizodeposits around growing root systems in three dimensions. This model approach allows us to study the evolution of rhizodeposition patterns around complex three-dimensional root systems. Root systems were generated using the root architect...
Article
Full-text available
Root water uptake is an important process in the terrestrial water cycle. How this process depends on soil water content, root distributions, and root properties is a soil–root hydraulic problem. We compare different approaches to implement root hydraulics in macroscopic soil water flow and land surface models. By upscaling a three-dimensional hydr...
Preprint
Full-text available
Tropical peatlands are among the most carbon-dense ecosystems on Earth, and their water storage dynamics strongly control these carbon stocks. The hydrological functioning of tropical peatlands differs from that of northern peatlands, which has not yet been accounted for in global land surface models (LSMs). Here, we integrated tropical peat-specif...
Preprint
Purpose Simultaneously interacting small-scale rhizosphere processes determine emergent plant-scale behaviour, including growth, transpiration, nutrient uptake, soil carbon storage and transformation by microorganisms. Current advances in modelling and experimental methods open the path to unravel and link those processes. Methods We present a seri...
Article
Full-text available
Soils with high stone content represent a challenge to root development, as each stone is an obstacle to root growth. A high stone content also affects soil properties such as temperature or water content, which in turn affects root growth. We investigated the effects of all soil properties combined on root development in the field using both exper...
Article
Full-text available
The Soil and Water (SoilWat) initiative is a joint activity between the Global Energy and Water Exchanges (GEWEX) project and the International Soil Modelling Consortium (ISMC). SoilWat aims to bring together two research communities to improve the representation of soil and subsurface processes in climate models. The soil modeling community (repre...
Preprint
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A new root solute uptake model based on a lumped version of the Trapp model (Trapp, 2000) was implemented in a coupled version of R-SWMS-ParTrace models for 3-D water flow and solute transport in soil and roots. Solute uptake was modeled as two individual processes: advection with the transpiration stream and diffusion through the root membrane. We...
Preprint
Full-text available
In this study, we developed a novel model approach to compute the spatio-temporal distribution patterns of rhizodeposits around growing root systems in three dimensions. Root systems were generated using the root architecture model CPlantBox. The concentration of rhizodeposits at a given location in the soil domain was computed analytically. To sim...
Article
Full-text available
Detailed knowledge of the intra‐field variability of soil properties and crop characteristics is indispensable for the establishment of sustainable precision agriculture. We present an approach that combines ground‐based agrogeophysical soil and aerial crop data to delineate field‐specific management zones that we interpret with soil attribute meas...
Article
Full-text available
In models of water flow in soil and roots, differences in the soil hydraulic properties of the rhizosphere and the bulk soil are usually neglected. There is, however, strong experimental evidence that rhizosphere and bulk soil hydraulic properties differ significantly from each other due to various root-soil interaction processes. Two such processe...
Preprint
Full-text available
Root water uptake is an important process in the terrestrial water cycle. How this process depends on soil water content, root distributions, and root properties is a soil-root hydraulic problem. We compare different approaches to implement root hydraulics in macroscopic soil water flow and land surface models. By upscaling a three dimensional hydr...
Article
Full-text available
Multiannual data (2016–2018) from 12 weighed lysimeters (four soil types with textures ranging from sandy loam to silt loam, three replicates) of the TERENO SOILCan network were used to evaluate if evaporation (E) rates could be predicted from weather data using the FAO Penman–Monteith (PM) method combined with soil water flow simulations using the...