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| Titel |
Hydrologic control on the root growth of Salix cuttings at the laboratory scale |
| VerfasserIn |
Valentina Baú, Baptiste Calliari, Paolo Perona |
| Konferenz |
EGU General Assembly 2017
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| Medientyp |
Artikel
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| Sprache |
en
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| Digitales Dokument |
PDF |
| Erschienen |
In: GRA - Volume 19 (2017) |
| Datensatznummer |
250149867
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| Publikation (Nr.) |
 EGU/EGU2017-14261.pdf |
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| Zusammenfassung |
| Riparian plant roots contribute to the ecosystem functioning and, to a certain extent, also
directly affect fluvial morphodynamics, e.g. by influencing sediment transport via mechanical
stabilization and trapping. There is much both scientific and engineering interest in
understanding the complex interactions among riparian vegetation and river processes. For
example, to investigate plant resilience to uprooting by flow, one should quantify the
probability that riparian plants may be uprooted during specific flooding event. Laboratory
flume experiments are of some help to this regard, but are often limited to use grass (e.g.,
Avena and Medicago sativa) as vegetation replicate with a number of limitations due to
fundamental scaling problems. Hence, the use of small-scale real plants grown undisturbed in
the actual sediment and within a reasonable time frame would be particularly helpful to
obtain more realistic flume experiments. The aim of this work is to develop and tune an
experimental technique to control the growth of the root vertical density distribution of
small-scale Salix cuttings of different sizes and lengths. This is obtained by controlling
the position of the saturated water table in the sedimentary bed according to the
sediment size distribution and the cutting length. Measurements in the rhizosphere are
performed by scanning and analysing the whole below-ground biomass by means of the
root analysis software WinRhizo, from which root morphology statistics and the
empirical vertical density distribution are obtained. The model of Tron et al. (2015) for
the vertical density distribution of the below-ground biomass is used to show that
experimental conditions that allow to develop the desired root density distribution can be
fairly well predicted. This augments enormously the flexibility and the applicability
of the proposed methodology in view of using such plants for novel flow erosion
experiments.
Tron, S., Perona, P., Gorla, L., Schwarz, M., Laio, F., and L. Ridolfi (2015). The
signature of randomness in riparian plant root distributions. Geophys. Res. Letts., 42,
7098-7106 |
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