Abstract
The study of the dynamic responses of plants to short-term environmental changes is becoming increasingly important in basic plant science, phenotyping, breeding, crop management, and modelling. These short-term variations are crucial in plant adaptation to new environments and, consequently, in plant fitness and productivity. Scalable, versatile, accurate, and low-cost data-logging solutions are necessary to advance these fields and complement existing sensing platforms such as high-throughput phenotyping. However, current data logging and sensing platforms do not meet the requirements to monitor these responses. Therefore, a new modular data logging platform was designed, named Gloxinia. Different sensor boards are interconnected depending upon the needs, with the potential to scale to hundreds of sensors in a distributed sensor system. To demonstrate the architecture, two sensor boards were designed—one for single-ended measurements and one for lock-in amplifier based measurements, named Sylvatica and Planalta, respectively. To evaluate the performance of the system in small setups, a small-scale trial was conducted in a growth chamber. Expected plant dynamics were successfully captured, indicating proper operation of the system. Though a large scale trial was not performed, we expect the system to scale very well to larger setups. Additionally, the platform is open-source, enabling other users to easily build upon our work and perform application-specific optimisations.
Highlights
Plants that grow in natural or agricultural environments are exposed to substantial short-term variations in environmental conditions
An experiment was conducted during ten days in a growth chamber of 1.45 × 0.77 × 1.45 m at Flanders Research Institute for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (ILVO), Melle, Belgium with a custom-built frame of 1.00 × 0.70 ×
All lighting was mounted on this frame, including 32 LED lamps (MAS LED spot VLE D 4.9-50W GU10 927 60D, Koninklijke Philips N.V., The Netherlands) and eleven halogen lights (DECOSTAR 51 PRO 50 W 12 V 36° GU5.3, OSRAM GmbH, Germany)
Summary
Plants that grow in natural or agricultural environments are exposed to substantial short-term variations in environmental conditions. Because fitness productivity of plants often lies in their ability to swiftly respond to these highly variable conditions, studying these dynamic responses is crucial. Research on stomatal responses and photosynthetic output often focuses on steady-state behaviour, while these conditions rarely occur in nature [1]. Measurement devices are not optimised to measure this transient behaviour, while the need for monitoring the response time. Sensors 2020, 20, 3055 of plant behaviour increases in different research fields of plant science. In basic plant science where the understanding of the short-term responses to environmental variation is central [2,3,4,5]
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