Ground Penetrating Radar for Belowground Phenotyping of High-biomass Grasses for Soil Carbon Sequestration
Abstract AimsMany governments and companies have committed to moving to net-zero emissions by 2030 or 2050 to tackle climate change, which require the development of new carbon capture and sequestration/storage (CCS) techniques. A proposed method of sequestration is to deposit carbon in soils as plant matter including root mass and root exudates. Adding perennial traits such as rhizomes to crops as part of a sequestration strategy would result in annual crop regrowth from rhizome meristems rather than requiring replanting from seeds which would in turn encourage no-till agricultural practices. Integrating these traits into productive agriculture requires a belowground phenotyping method compatible with high throughput breeding and selection methods (i.e., is rapid, inexpensive, reliable, and non-invasive), however none currently exist. MethodsGround penetrating radar (GPR) is a non-invasive subsurface sensing technology that shows potential as a phenotyping technique. In this study, a prototype GPR antenna array was used to scan roots of the perennial sorghum hybrid, PSH09TX15. A-scan level time-domain analyses and B-scan level time/frequency analyses using the continuous wavelet transform were utilized to extract features of interest from the acquired radargrams. ResultsOf six A-scan diagnostic indices examined, the standard deviation of signal amplitude correlated most significantly with belowground biomass. Time frequency analysis using the continuous wavelet transform yielded high correlations of B-scan features with belowground biomass. ConclusionThese results demonstrate that continued refinement of GPR data analysis workflows should yield a highly applicable phenotyping tool for breeding efforts in environments where selection is otherwise impractical on a large scale.