The effect of low-intensive coherent seed irradiation on germinant growth of Scots pine and sugar beet

Abstract

The success of forest and agricultural plant establishment program mainly depends on the quality of reproductive material. The study intends to offer engineers and farm owners a solution for small-size seed improvement before sowing. The effect of low-intensity coherent light on the seeds of various crops is theoretically and empirically hypothesized. The seedlots of Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris L.) and sugar beet (Beta vulgaris L.) of Russian diploid hybrid RMS-127 were germinated in a controlled environment. The germinants were produced from six seed fractions, previously irradiated with 1.274 W·m<sup>–2</sup> at the 632.8 nm wavelength with 1, 2, 3, 5, 10, 15 min exposure to a standard laser system, plus untreated control. Pine germinants were measured on day 15, beetroot on day 10 after germination. An increase in exposure time reduced Scots pine germination energy and capacity, while for sugar beet the results were not conclusive. On the contrary, increasing the exposure time had a positive effect on both the height and biomass growth of both Scots pine and sugar beet germinants. The 10-min exposure time resulted in maximum values for sugar beet height and biomass and Scots pine height, while the 15-min exposure time produced maximum Scots pine biomass.

How Can the Engineering Parameters of the NIR Grader Affect the Efficiency of Seed Grading?

“…The use of optical beams is important for the assessment [5], preparation [6], and non-destructive quality control [7][8][9][10] of reproductive material [11][12][13][14], including Scots pine [15][16][17][18][19]. The main driving factor for this study is the different absorption ability of a conditioned and substandard single seed of Scots pine of an optical beam in the nearinfrared (NIR) region [20].…”

The VIS-Spectrometric Data of Scots Pine Individual Seed Reveal Forecasting Potential for Container-Grown Germination and Seedling’s Dickson Quality Index

“…The quality of the seeds is closely correlated with their spectrometric properties. Moreover, the effectiveness of performing a group of seeding operations (including aerial seeding [231] on hard-to-cultivate areas) depends on the quality of seeds [3,6,12,13,34,72,79,85,89,107,111,115,139,143,175,203,217,[223][224][225][226][227][228][229][230].…”