Ever wish you had insight on whether the plants in your home garden are really thriving?
A group of Northeastern University researchers recently developed sensors that change color to indicate the health status of plants. This can be used not only for your basic house plant, but could be used to help small farms monitor their crops in the face of environmental stressors like weather shifts, pollution and disease.
“It’s filling a gap,” said Josie Cicero, a master’s student in marine biology at Northeastern and one of the co-authors on the research.
Current methods for checking plant health are very expensive, Cicero said.
“[They] take a long time to process, and aren’t accessible for a lot of people,” Cicero said, “whereas this device allows you to do an assessment on the stress level of plants in a couple minutes in the field instead of having to collect samples, send them off and spend hundreds to thousands of dollars to get the results a week later.”
Read more at Northeastern Global News
Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University
