root zone

plural root zones · alternative rootzone

1. The region of soil in which the roots of plants can effectively extract water and nutrients essential for growth.

   If the salt below the root zone just stayed there, it wouldn't be a problem.

   2011, Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail Or Succeed: Revised Edition, page 401

   3 more examples

   So, too, repeated watering of this character would only exaggerate the difficulty until the soil of the root zone was too far dried to be further affected in the manner under consideration.

   1890, University of Wisconsin-Madison, College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, Research Division, Annual Report of the Agricultural Experiment Station of the University of Wisconsin for the Year Ending June 30, 1890, page 139

   Tensiometers placed in the active root zone and near the bottom of the root zone (corresponding to depths of 30 and 60 cm in the figure) provide information that permits control of deep percolation.

   1973, McGraw-Hill Book Company, McGraw-Hill Yearbook of Science and Technology, page 382

   The root zones demonstrate that repeated injections of different batches of kimberlite magma have occurred and that sufficient time was available for each batch to crystallize completely prior to emplacement of younger magmas

   1986, Roger H. Mitchell, Kimberlites - Mineralogy, Geochemistry, and Petrology, page 83