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Article

English, Spanish

ID: <

oai:doaj.org/article:2838c8e2e37a4232840c346ee077f943

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DOI: <

10.25260/EA.20.30.2.0.965

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Where these data come from
Eyes you don’t see... What can we do to include the underground fraction more in vegetation studies?

Abstract

Knowing the structure and functioning of the underground fraction of vegetation is essential to understand many processes that occur at different levels of organisation. However, this fraction was less studied than its aerial counterpart, mainly because of the great effort needed to sample it in the field and process it in the laboratory. Two symposia were held at the XXVIII Argentinian Ecology Meeting (Mar del Plata, 2018) on the importance of knowing the roots in ecological studies. The symposia created the need for (1) quantifying the studies that have assessed the underground and aerial fractions of vegetation, and (2) determining the methodologies used and the variables of the underground fraction recorded in natural systems (i.e. grasslands, steppes, forests, arbustals and deserts) and anthropiates (i.e. pastures and crops) in six phytogeographical provinces of Argentina and in two geomorphological regions of Uruguay. There were 933 studies published between 1990 and 2019. 57 % and 23 % were accounted for by studies exclusively for the air and underground fraction, respectively, with an exponential increase over time for both fractions. There is currently a tendency to incorporate the underground compartment into ecological studies. A systematic analysis found that six sampling methods (barrene, rulons, whole plant, monolites, rhizotron and estimation of underground biomass from ground biomass) were used to assess four variables (underground biomass, underground net primary productivity, some radical attributes and radical decomposition rate). The most commonly used method was the barrene method and the most assessed variable was underground biomass. We propose to encourage collaboration between research teams and to establish methodological comparisons to understand the scope of the results and to obtain more reliable estimates of the impacts of land use change.

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