Signal 3: Plant wearables, a big data revolution in agriculture.
An innovative way to remotely monitor and control environmental and botanical aspects of individual plants in a massive scale. Researchers at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) have developed stretchable plant wearables and smart tags dropped by drones to give agriculture a step forward in big data.
This study was done in hopes to tackle the pressing challenges to increase agricultural output in harsh environments, infertile lands, and forests. Previous reliable way to monitor plant growth was through active imaging systems and dynamic user interfaces requiring advanced and expensive equipment. Other techniques try to optimize plant growth conditions by adjusting the environment parameters such as the temperature, humidity, soil water, and illumination data. However, very few techniques exist to monitor the physical individual plant growth itself.
We needed a more effective way to understand how the localized microclimate conditions are directly affecting the plant’s growth. The sensors developed were intended to be small and relatively cheap in order to conduct a mass monitoring of individual plants in large greenhouses or crop fields.
The data collected enables us to further study the plant’s behaviors and possibly make real-time decisions to adjust their microclimate conditions. An increase of even 1 percent of produce output would be a game changer.
“The ability to remotely track and correlate the effect of local environmental conditions on the healthy growth of plants can have great impact for increasing survival rate of plants and augmenting agriculture output.”
