Roots play a major role in plant development. Their study in field conditions is important to identify suitable soil management practices for sustainable crop productions. Soil coring, which is a common method in root production measurement, is limited in sampling frequency due to the hand-sorting step. This step, needed to sort roots from other elements extracted from soil cores like crop residues, is time consuming, tedious, and vulnerable to operator ability and subjectivity. To get rid of the cumbersome hand-sorting step, avoid confusion between these elements, and reduce the time needed to quantify roots, a new procedure, based on near-infrared hyperspectral imaging spectroscopy and chemometrics, has been proposed. It was tested to discriminate roots of winter wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) from crop residues and soil particles.Two algorithms (support vector machine and partial least squares discriminant analysis) have been compared for discrimination analysis. Models constructed with both algorithms allowed the discrimination of roots from other elements, but the best results were reached with models based on support vector machine. The ways to validate models, with selected spectra or with hyperspectral images, provided different kinds of information but were complementary. This new procedure of root discrimination is a first step before root quantification in soil samples with near-infrared hyperspectral imaging. The results indicate that the methodology could be an interesting tool to improve the understanding of the effect of tillage or fertilization, for example, on root system development. conditions. The potential of plants to obtain water and mineral nutrients from the soil is primarily attributed to their capacity to develop extensive root systems.2 Studies on root development are important for a better understanding of the interaction between crop root systems and the growing environment to identify suitable soil management practices for sustainable crop productions. 4 The time taken by roots to colonize the deep soil profile and the root system biomass production during the whole crop development cycle are therefore good indicators to interpret crop behavior in various management modes and in a given soilclimate context. Nevertheless, roots are rarely directly evaluated in field experiments because soil limits accessibility for their observation. 1,5 Therefore, they need to be extracted from soil before any measurement can be made.Soil coring is a commonly used method to sample roots in field experiments and measure their production. 6 This technique is not expensive and allows repeated measurements during crop growth at several soil depths. After soil coring, cores need to be washed to extract roots from soil. Others elements, mainly crop residues buried in crop soils, are also extracted during the washing step and need to be separated from roots, commonly by hand-sorting, before any analysis or quantification of roots. 1,4,5,[7][8][9][10] This sorting step is time-consuming, tedious, an...