Use of electrical resistivity tomography to map the tree roots

TL;DR

This paper presents an advanced numerical method using electrical resistivity tomography combined with adaptive finite element modeling to effectively map and visualize buried tree root structures, simplifying complex root systems.

Contribution

It introduces a novel adaptive finite element approach that simplifies root modeling and allows detailed resistivity mapping of tree roots.

Findings

Effective visualization of buried tree roots achieved.

Adaptive meshing improves mapping accuracy.

Simplified root models retain essential structural information.

Abstract

An efficient advanced numerical model for mapping the distribution of the buried tree roots is presented. It not only simplify the complicate root branches to an easy manipulated model, but also grasp the main structure of tree roots ignoring the unnecessary minutiae, and thus provide an intuitive impression of subsurface invisible anomalies. The processing model is combined with an adaptive finite element method, which can automatically generate unstructured triangular meshes during the process of discretization, which also enable user to specifically set the resistivity along each part of tree roots.