Field-experiences of tracking plant’s xylem embolism formation with embedded acoustic emission sensors


Plant physiology, forestry, and agriculture require novel field-deployable instruments for tracking plant’s hydraulic status, to enhance understanding of the strategies plants developed to cope with drought stress, enable tracking of damages caused by seasonal droughts, and to rationalize water expenditure used for precision-irrigation. Acoustic emission sensing (AE) is a promising indirect method of non-invasively tracking the cavitation-induced xylem embolism. We developed a lowpower embedded system enabling in-field 2,5 MHz AE acquisition, real-time sensor-response equalization, time-, and frequency-domain feature extraction, micro-SD storage and Sigfox wireless communication. The system is solar-powered and operates with commercial miniature piezoelectric transducers (Vallen). In this paper we show early results of our work-in-progress on outdoor testing on grapevine plants.
