A digital sensor to measure real-time leaf movements and detect abiotic stress in plants.

Abstract

Plant and plant organ movements are the result of a complex integration of endogenous growth and developmental responses, partially controlled by the circadian clock, and external environmental cues. Monitoring of plant motion is typically done by image-based phenotyping techniques with the aid of computer vision algorithms. Here we present a method to measure leaf movements using a digital inertial measurement unit (IMU) sensor. The lightweight sensor is easily attachable to a leaf or plant organ and records angular traits in real-time for two dimensions (pitch and roll) with high resolution (measured sensor oscillations of 0.36 ± 0.53° for pitch and 0.50 ± 0.65° for roll). We were able to record simple movements such as petiole bending, as well as complex lamina motions, in several crops, ranging from tomato to banana. We also assessed growth responses in terms of lettuce rosette expansion and maize seedling stem movements. The IMU sensors are capable of detecting small changes of nutations (i.e. bending movements) in leaves of different ages and in different plant species. In addition, the sensor system can also monitor stress-induced leaf movements. We observed that unfavorable environmental conditions evoke certain leaf movements, such as drastic epinastic responses, as well as subtle fading of the amplitude of nutations. In summary, the presented digital sensor system enables continuous detection of a variety of leaf motions with high precision, and is a low-cost tool in the field of plant phenotyping, with potential applications in early stress detection.

Plant phenotyping relevance

植物の葉の動きをIMUセンサーで高精度・リアルタイムに測定する手法を開発し、複数作物で検証・応用しているため、植物フェノタイピング手法が中心である。

Code and data availability

The supplied blocks contain no public phenotype datasets, sensor data, images, analysis code, or trained models specific to this paper. The only URLs present are vendor/company sites (LemnaTec, Phenospex, WIWAM) cited as references, ORCID author identifiers, the license, and the journal instructions page; none is an作者-

No evidence-backed public reproduction asset is currently recorded.