Abstract
Climatic projections indicate that Europe should face a significant change in seasonal rainfall distribution, with up to 25% less precipitations in Summer by the end of the 21st century.. The yield of grasslands, that make for a large part of Belgian agricultural system, would be amongst the most affected by these new scenarios of water deficit. The ovseral goal of the ForDrought project, launched at UCLouvain in 2012, is to improve the performance of forage crops to cope with climate change. The specific objectives of this study were to observe the responses of root systems of grassland plants exposed to a water deficit and to assess the value of plant species association. The species studied were Dactylis glomerata and Medicago sativa. Large pits were dug on the border of experimental plots of pure and mixed composition, exposed or not to a one-month long summer drought, to carry out different root system observations. The number of roots in each pit were counted following the trench profile method. In addition, roots were extracted from vertical and horizontal soil cores and root DNA was analysed to determine the specific root distribution of each species. The parcels were harvested and yield measured four times over the course of one year. Finally, the soil profile and the depth of the ploughpan for each plot were also determined. The results showed that a water deficit had an impact on the root density of both species. However, this impact differed between species: Medicago had more roots when exposed to the deficit while Dactylis tended to produce fewer roots. The genetic analysis turned out to be biased against Dactylis which could not be detected when it was mixed with Medicago, despite many protocol adjustments were implemented to circumvent the problem. The yield was negatively impacted by water deficit, for all plots. The association of species did not produce any clear effect on the yield. However, the soil observation showed that the ploughpan was abnormally thick in all of plots, which may have limited the expression of the species specificities and of the differences between pure and mixed stands.
Abstract from the paper’s OpenAlex record; open copy licensed other-oa. Read at the source ↗
The text the model read, with the source record’s inline markup (italics, sub- and superscripts) rendered and its character entities decoded; quote offsets refer to the raw text.
Claims 6
Claim · model-written summary
Medicago had more roots when exposed to water deficit.
MedicagoNot reportedComparator
Organisms pictured · Representative pictures of the matched species, not figures from the paper.
Verbatim
e1“The results showed that a water deficit had an impact on the root density of both species”
e2“Medicago had more roots when exposed to the deficit while Dactylis tended to produce fewer roots”
Claim · model-written summary
Dactylis tended to produce fewer roots when exposed to water deficit.
DactylisNot reportedComparator
Organisms pictured · Representative pictures of the matched species, not figures from the paper.
Verbatim
e1“The results showed that a water deficit had an impact on the root density of both species”
e2“Medicago had more roots when exposed to the deficit while Dactylis tended to produce fewer roots”
Claim · model-written summary
Dactylis could not be detected by the genetic analysis when it was mixed with Medicago.
Organisms pictured · Representative pictures of the matched species, not figures from the paper.
Verbatim
e3“The species studied were Dactylis glomerata and Medicago sativa”
e6“could not be detected when it was mixed with Medicago”
Claim · model-written summary
Water deficit negatively impacted yield in all plots.
- Taxon
- Dactylis glomerata and Medicago sativa
Medicago sativa.jpg?width=60)
Dactylis glomeratae3 - Treatment
- water deficite4
- Outcome
- yielde4
- Direction
- negatively impactede4
Not reportedComparator
Organisms pictured · Representative pictures of the matched species, not figures from the paper.
.jpg?width=500)
Verbatim
e3“The species studied were Dactylis glomerata and Medicago sativa”
e4“The yield was negatively impacted by water deficit, for all plots”
Claim · model-written summary
The association of species had no clear effect on yield.
- Taxon
- Dactylis glomerata and Medicago sativaMedicago sativaDactylis glomeratae3
- Treatment
- association of speciese5
- Outcome
- yielde5
- Direction
- no_changeinferrede5
Organisms pictured · Representative pictures of the matched species, not figures from the paper.
Verbatim
e3“The species studied were Dactylis glomerata and Medicago sativa”
e5“The association of species did not produce any clear effect on the yield”
Claim · model-written summary
The ploughpan was abnormally thick in all plots.
- Taxon
- Dactylis glomerata and Medicago sativaMedicago sativaDactylis glomeratae3
- Outcome
- ploughpane7
- Qualifier
- abnormally thick in all of plotse7
Organisms pictured · Representative pictures of the matched species, not figures from the paper.
Verbatim
e3“The species studied were Dactylis glomerata and Medicago sativa”
e7“the ploughpan was abnormally thick in all of plots”
The same questions in other papers
drought · yield · Dactylis glomerata (cocksfoot)Positive and negative results
8 papers in the same direction as this paper · 2 in the opposite direction
- positive
- positive
- negative
7 papers more in this group
See all 11 papers →drought · yield · Medicago sativa (alfalfa)Positive and negative results
19 papers in the same direction as this paper · 4 in the opposite direction
- positive
- positive
- positive
20 papers more in this group
See all 24 papers →Claims are grouped by organism, treatment and what was measured or targeted. A paper counts as positive when any of its claims in the group is positive.