Root growth potential(RGP) is a popular physiological test method to evaluate seedling vigor. But the time used in RGP is the order of days , which lead to the poor performance of RGP. To decrease the time used on measuring RGP, we propose optical interference method, called statistical interferometry, to measure minute root elongation in the order of sub-nanometer, which is faster than RGP method with several orders of magnitude. Because we can measure the length of root elongation continuously, we can compute the root elongation rate(PER), which is the variety of root elongation's length per second. The continuously monitoring can help determine the masson seedling quality as soon as possible. To show the effectiveness of our proposed method, we designed an experiment, in which we applied different water stresses on our collected masson pine seedlings and acquired two groups of pines, representing two different quality: one is stressed by water and the other is not. After measuring PER of them in our experiments, we found that PER is interrelated with the quality of the seedlings.

中文翻译：

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一种连续监测马尾松幼苗质量的方法

根系生长潜力（RGP）是一种用于评估幼苗活力的流行生理测试方法。但是RGP中使用的时间是几天，这导致RGP的性能不佳。为了减少用于测量RGP的时间，我们提出了一种称为统计干涉法的光学干涉方法，用于测量亚纳米级的微小根伸长，它比具有多个数量级的RGP方法要快。因为我们可以连续测量根伸长的长度，所以我们可以计算根伸长率（PER），PER是每秒根伸长的长度的变化。持续的监测有助于尽快确定马尾苗的质量。为了展示我们提出的方法的有效性，我们设计了一个实验，我们在收集到的马尾松幼苗上施加了不同的水分胁迫，并获得了两组代表两种不同质量的松树：一组受到水的胁迫，而另一组则没有。在我们的实验中测量了它们的PER之后，我们发现PER与幼苗的质量相关。