Written by Melody Kroll
April 13, 2015
As the prospect of more frequent drought looms, more research attention is being paid to the responses of plants to soil moisture availability. Conventional wisdom says that plants with roots that penetrate deep below the surface of the soil have an advantage over plants with shallow root systems when moisture is scarce during drought, and therefore a large amount of attention has been devoted to quantifying maximum rooting depth. Dr. Ricardo Holdo, a savanna ecologist in the Division of Biological Sciences at MU, questions this fundamental assumption in a new study of savanna and prairie plants published in Functional Ecology in collaboration with Dr. Jesse Nippert of Kansas State University.

Read the study: Nippert, JB, and Holdo, RM. 2015. Challenging the maximum rooting depth paradigm in grasslands and savannas. Functional Ecology. DOI: 10.1111/1365-2435.12390.