This title appears in the Scientific Report :
2016
Routine assessment of water distribution in plants using microwave cavity resonators
Routine assessment of water distribution in plants using microwave cavity resonators
We have designed and tested a family of microwave resonators (PhenoCAVe) as a non-invasive method to estimate the water content of plants shoots [1]. Operating at the upper limit of radiofrequency, 360 MHz for the greenhouse implemented resonator and 1.15 GHz for the laboratory setup, allows to achi...
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Personal Name(s): | Sydoruk, Viktor (Corresponding author) |
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Fiorani, Fabio / Jahnke, Siegfried | |
Contributing Institute: |
Pflanzenwissenschaften; IBG-2 |
Imprint: |
2016
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Conference: | PLANT 2030 Status Seminar, Potsdam (Germany), 2016-03-14 - 2016-03-16 |
Document Type: |
Poster |
Research Program: |
Deutsches Pflanzen Phänotypisierungsnetzwerk Plant Science |
Publikationsportal JuSER |
We have designed and tested a family of microwave resonators (PhenoCAVe) as a non-invasive method to estimate the water content of plants shoots [1]. Operating at the upper limit of radiofrequency, 360 MHz for the greenhouse implemented resonator and 1.15 GHz for the laboratory setup, allows to achieve a good penetration depth of electromagnetic waves not only into tissues but also in soil. This provides an opportunity to measure water content of both soil and shoot. By moving a plant and the pot through the resonator a ‘layer-by-layer’ response curve is acquired resulting in a blurred 1D water distribution along the axis of measurement due to the Gaussian distribution of the field inside the resonator. Applying nonlinear fitting, or deconvolution of the obtained response curve, allows to obtain a spatial resolution down to 1 cm. After calibration, the correlations we obtained between the integral of the response signal of the microwave approach and the water content of the shoots destructively measured after harvest were very good for maize (R2 = 0.996) and rapeseed (R2 = 0.989). Due to our experiments with the setups and theoretical predictions we found that (i) the method is sensitive enough to detect <1% changes in water content, (ii) the signal responses to experimental manipulation are rapid (tens of ms); (iii) the method is stable within the range of environmental conditions (T and RH) typically encountered during the measurements and (iv), in addition to shoot water content, we can estimate simultaneously in the same scan the soil moisture content of the pots. All this indicates that the approach is suitable to various kinds of applications ranging from real-time quantification of biomass growth starting from germination at different temperature/humidity conditions and rapid reaction of a plant to varying aboveground or belowground conditions. We have built a fully automated setup integrated in the measurement routine of the SCREEN-House shoot imaging phenotyping system at IBG2. The current construction and automation concept allows handling of up to 300 plants with a throughput of about 40 plants per hour which may be further increased in future implementations. The setup allows measuring plants up to 1m height and about 40cm width. The laboratory system on the other hand works preferably with one plant over a period of time, allowing continuous measurements of 1D water distribution, i.e. from germination to a stage of fully formed plant (up to 33cm in height and 11cm in width). Both laboratory and greenhouse setups require powerful data analysis software. The main core of it is already operating by using LabView scripts and can be further transformed to provide fully automated data analysis.[1] V.A. Sydoruk, F. Fiorani, S. Jahnke and H.-J. Krause, „Design and characterization of microwave cavity resonators for non-invasive monitoring of plant water distribution” submitted to IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Technique. |