Cohabiting Plant‐Wearable Sensor In Situ Monitors Water Transport in Plant

Abstract

The boom of plant phenotype highlights the need to measure the physiological characteristics of an individual plant. However, continuous real-time monitoring of a plant's internal physiological status remains challenging using traditional silicon-based sensor technology, due to the fundamental mismatch between rigid sensors and soft and curved plant surfaces. Here, the first flexible electronic sensing device is reported that can harmlessly cohabitate with the plant and continuously monitor its stem sap flow, a critical plant physiological characteristic for analyzing plant health, water consumption, and nutrient distribution. Due to a special design and the materials chosen, the realized plant-wearable sensor is thin, soft, lightweight, air/water/light-permeable, and shows excellent biocompatibility, therefore enabling the sap flow detection in a continuous and non-destructive manner. The sensor can serve as a noninvasive, high-throughput, low-cost toolbox, and holds excellent potentials in phenotyping. Furthermore, the real-time investigation on stem flow insides watermelon reveals a previously unknown day/night shift pattern of water allocation between fruit and its adjacent branch, which has not been reported before.

Plant phenotyping relevance

植物の茎内樹液流を連続・非破壊測定するウェアラブルセンサーを開発し、植物フェノタイピングへの利用可能性と実植物での性能を示した研究であり、表現型取得法が中心である。

Code and data availability

The article describes a plant-wearable sap flow sensor and its phenotyping measurements, but no public dataset, image collection, code repository, or trained model is deposited. The Data Availability Statement only states data are available within the article and its supplementary materials, with no authors' public URL

No evidence-backed public reproduction asset is currently recorded.