Leaf movements as a quantitative metric for early stress detection

Abstract

Early, precise, and non-destructive stress detection is essential for maintaining crop productivity, particularly in high-density plant growth systems like controlled environment agriculture (CEA), where manual monitoring is often impractical. Using plant motion as a proxy for growth and plant health, we demonstrate a method for early, non-invasive stress detection through quantitative leaf-movement analysis in lettuce and five other CEA relevant crops. Leaf-movement dynamics under stress were imaged with a low-cost, scalable Raspberry Pi imaging setup and quantified using a repurposed open-source motion estimation algorithm; Tracking Rhythms in Plants (TRiP). Our system detected stress-induced changes in leaf-movement within 1 hour of stress, with the timing dependent on the nature of the stress. Sustained reductions in leaf-movement coincide with decreased biomass accumulation. This approach offers a non-invasive, rapid, scalable, and cost-effective solution for continuous crop monitoring, with potential for application in both terrestrial and space farming CEA systems. Abstract Figure Graphical abstract: Quantification of leaf-movement dynamics as a high-throughput proxy for plant physiological status, enabling early stress detection and timely intervention to mitigate yield penalties in CEA settings (image made with biorender.org).

Plant phenotyping relevance

低コスト撮像と既存アルゴリズムを用いて葉の動きを定量化し、植物ストレス・生理状態を早期推定する方法が研究の中心である。

Code and data availability

The paper describes Raspberry Pi time-lapse imaging and TRiP-based motion analysis, and mentions image data availability via a citation (Mortimer & Gilliham, 2025), but no authors' public URL, repository, or identifier for the image data, analysis code, or supplementary datasets appears in the supplied blocks. The only

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