1,180 root system drawings
13 comments
·October 18, 2025daemonologist
throwup238
They usually are. It’s a process akin to archaeology where they have to carefully wash away the dirt from the root system, measuring as they go. The problem with this method is that it's hard to reconstruct the entire 3d structure of bigger plants like trees so a lot of the root drawings on the site don’t accurately show how deep they go. It’s much easier with small plants where the researcher can control the soil used.
Modern methods like xray CT or ground penetrating radar can do it nondestructively in the field but they’re usually expensive to set up compared to just sending some grad students to dig.
JKCalhoun
I had assumed they had grown the plant between two vertical, parallel panes of glass.
Karliss
Collection history page has a photo for part of the process https://images.wur.nl/digital/collection/coll13
mellosouls
Nice link, for anybody coming to the comments first, it isn't a sample of linux system layouts as I thought.
perihelions
I thought it'd be about Lie groups!
thirtygeo
Really neat. I've often wondered about what the unexposed part of trees and plants are.
Like: am I walking on them? Are they tapping down somewhere deep or are they shallow.
The examples on a hill were interesting; I would have thought the extent would be skewed but it was fairly even
Sponge5
Recently there was an exhibition of tree root illustrations by Jitka Klimesova in Prague. I think there's potential for more art emerging from science.
29athrowaway
From the perspective of a plant... In soil, you have: silt, clay and sand. Plus other plants, fungi, worms, microorganisms, rocks, insects, animals, etc. Each plant needs different nutrients (nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and others), need different pH levels, can tolerate different salinity, etc. There might be different humidity, precipitation, wind speed, the water tables are different...
I guess all these differences translate into how the root must structurally develop to satisfy all those requirements and constraints.
hagbard_c
Who'd'a'thought I'd come across root drawings from my old university where I studied at the Forestry faculty which produced these.
bookofjoe
HN is like Forrest Gump's box of chocolates: you never know what you might get!
alienbaby
reminds me alot of patterns from diffusion limited aggregation.
cynicalsecurity
Not what I expected, but this is really cool.
How are these produced? I assume they're not actually digging a giant trench and taking a section, but are the drawings based on measurements of a specific individual in some way?
In any case, very cool to have such a collection.