Plant Health Monitoring

Climate change, arable land reduction, and world population growth pose very serious threats to food security. It is in this context that Climate-Smart Agriculture developed. It aims at merging together farming and engineering knowledges to boost fields productions and reduce agricultural practices environmental footprint. Our research group’s activity deals with the development of low-cost, low-power, and autonomous electronic systems for in-vivo and real-time plants health status monitoring. These devices are meant to be installed directly on the plants and deployed into the fields to perform analyses involving plant parameters instead of the environment surrounding them. This approach is referred to as the “direct approach”. Our attention focused on monitoring in-vivo plant stem (or trunk) electrical impedance. This parameter proved to be closely related to plant water stress status and its biological activity. As a study conducted by our research group found out, it can detect plant’s issues that visual inspections nor environmental sensor could. Moreover, electrical impedance can be easily read with simple, low-cost, and low-power devices that in the next future could be completely made of bio-degradable materials and substrates. These devices characteristics together with plants and soil electrical conductivity paves the way toward the development of the Internet of Plants (IoP). In this framework devices collect data regarding crops health status and transmit them through the plants themselves instead of exploiting radiofrequency protocols. Therefore, plants will act as part of knots making up the net that inspects their health status.

Keywords: Climate-Smart Agriculture, In-Vivo Monitoring, Stem Electrical Impedance, Plants’ Resilience, Internet of Plants.

References:

• • Umberto Garlando, Stefano Calvo, Mattia Barezzi, Alessandro Sanginario, Paolo Motto Ros, Danilo Demarchi, “Ask the plants directly: Understanding plant needs using electrical impedance measurements”, Computers and Electronics in Agriculture, Volume 193, 2022, 106707, ISSN 0168-1699, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compag.2022.106707.
  • Garlando et al., “Towards Optimal Green Plant Irrigation: Watering and Body Electrical Impedance”, 2020 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS), Seville, Spain, 2020, pp. 1-5, doi: 10.1109/ISCAS45731.2020.9181290.
  • Garlando et al., “Analysis of in Vivo Plant Stem Impedance Variations in Relation with External Conditions Daily Cycle,” 2021 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS), Daegu, Korea, 2021, pp. 1-5, doi: 10.1109/ISCAS51556.2021.9401242.
  • M. Ros, E. Macrelli, A. Sanginario, Y. Shacham-Diamand and D. Demarchi, “Electronic System for Signal Transmission Inside Green Plant Body,” 2019 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS), Sapporo, Japan, 2019, pp. 1-5, doi: 10.1109/ISCAS.2019.8702577.
  • Garlando et al., “A ‘plant-wearable system’ for its health monitoring by intra- and inter-plant communication”, 2023, Transaction on AgriFood Electronics (TAFE) (Accepted).
  • Calvo et al., “In-vivo proximal monitoring system for plant water stress and biological activity based on stem electrical impedance”, 2023, IWASI (Accepted).