Root system drawings

The knowledge of root depth and spatial extension of different plant species in arable land and grassland immensely helped to better understand their growth conditions, and, in turn, this helped to develop several new farming ideas. Their work led to a number of publications, and is a counterpart to the work by John E. Weaver in Nebraska, USA. These scans of the original drawings, made by Univ.-Prof. Dr. E. Lichtenegger (d. 2004), cover not only a wide variety of species ranging from agricultural crops to associated weeds, but also natural vegetation, from orchids to alpine shrubs and trees. The drawings represent rooting systems of individual species carefully isolated from their environment, and drawn in fine detail. Erwin Lichtenegger continued to draw the whole plant of their findings, including the root and shoot. Sometimes the researchers spent their holidays making excavations and drawings. One day the researchers were preparing a root sample on a dike in the Netherlands. An employee of 'Rijkswaterstaat' ordered them to leave, because he thought, they were damaging the dike.Ecologists and soil physicists found WUR funding to scan this unique set of drawings in archive quality. The drawings were scanned in Vienna. Klaas Metselaar, researcher at Soil Physics and Land Management, coded the figure captions of one part of the 'Wurzelatlas'. Captions from this atlas are now available for statistical analysis. The dataset is stored in the e-depot. The captions in the other atlases are currently being coded. https://images.wur.nl/digital/collection/coll13