[en] Roots, the belowground part of plants, play a major role in plant development. Their study in field conditions is important to identify suitable soil management practices
for suitable crop production but roots are hidden by soil and their study is therefore difficult. Estimation of root system development is often based on the soil coring
method which allows repeated measurements during the growing season in the field as well as in different soil horizons. However, this method is limited due to the time
needed to extract roots from soil cores and to manually sort them from crop residues before quantification. To avoid this tedious sorting step and remove operator
subjectivity, a faster sorting method was developed. Near infrared hyperspectral imaging (NIR-HIS) was tested as a rapid method to quantify the amount of roots in soil
samples.
