Evaluating plant potassium status

Abstract

Several methods exist for evaluating plant nutritional status. Looking for visual deficiency symptoms is perhaps the simplest approach, but once symptoms appear, crop performance has already been compromised. Several other techniques have been developed. All of them require correlation studies to provide plant performance interpretations. Reflectance is a remote sensing technique that detects changes in light energy reflected by plant tissue. It has proven successful in detecting nutrient deficiencies but does not yet have the ability to discriminate among more than one deficiency. Chemical assays of leaf tissue, known as tissue tests, require destructive sampling but are the standard against which other assessments are compared. Sufficiency ranges provide concentrations of each nutrient that are considered adequate for crop growth and development. They consider nutrients in isolation. Other approaches have been developed to consider how the concentration of one nutrient in tissue impacts the concentrations of other nutrients. These approaches strive to develop guidelines for maintaining nutrient balance within the plant. All approaches require large data sets for interpretation.