The most economically important physiological process in sweetpotato is storage root initiation. The number of adventitious roots (ARs) that undergo storage root initiation can vary within and among individual plants. This extends to entire fields, which can vary in storage root yield by up to 50%. This unpredictability is further compounded by the fact that crop yield can only be evaluated post-factum and above-ground growth frequently provides little or no indication of productivity in commercial production settings. Significant progress has been achieved in understanding the environmental, physiological, and molecular cues of storage root formation but current evidence cannot be reconciled with root system architecture variability. Functional-Structural Plant Models (FSPM) such as OpenSimRoot are used to explore and understand the complex interactions among morphological and architectural traits, environment variables, and source-sink relations. OpenSimRoot is capable of simulating spatiotemporal dynamics of plant growth, including 3D root architecture, nutrient and water acquisition, and carbon processes underlying plant growth, but requires extensive parameterization. Here we describe the parameterization of OpenSimRoot to model the timing of storage root initiation and initial bulking stages. The model was parameterized using data from sweetpotato cultivar ‘Beauregard’ grown under greenhouse and irrigated field conditions, along with available data from literature. We will outline subsequent work that links root system architecture to storage root initiation, leading to future studies on the dynamics of carbon-related processes that determine the competency of adventitious roots to become storage roots.
