A METHOD OF PROCESSING SOIL CORE SAMPLES FOR ROOT STUDIES BY SUBSAMPLING

Root studies are generally believed to be very important in ecological research. Soil coring is a valuable approach to root research, but it requires a very large amount of processing time. We present here a me thod for processing soil cores consisting of the combination and homog enization of several soil cores from a plot, with subsequent subsampli ng for root extraction. The required subsample size was determined for a topsoil and a subsoil sample from a groundnut field and was found t o be 5-10% of the total soil sample. Advantages and limitations of the method are discussed.