Leaf movements as a quantitative metric for early stress detection

Early, precise, and non-destructive stress detection is essential for maintaining crop productivity, particularly in high-density plant growth systems like controlled environment agriculture (CEA), where manual monitoring is often impractical. Using plant motion as a proxy for growth and plant health, we demonstrate a method for early, non-invasive stress detection through quantitative leaf-movement analysis in lettuce and five other CEA relevant crops. Leaf-movement dynamics under stress were imaged with a low-cost, scalable Raspberry Pi imaging setup and quantified using a repurposed open-source motion estimation algorithm; Tracking Rhythms in Plants (TRiP). Our system detected stress-induced changes in leaf-movement within 1 hour of stress, with the timing dependent on the nature of the stress. Sustained reductions in leaf-movement coincide with decreased biomass accumulation. This approach offers a non-invasive, rapid, scalable, and cost-effective solution for continuous crop monitoring, with potential for application in both terrestrial and space farming CEA systems. O_FIG O_LINKSMALLFIG WIDTH=200 HEIGHT=138 SRC="FIGDIR/small/732190v1_ufig1.gif" ALT="Figure 1"> View larger version (54K): org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@19ee20eorg.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@b0804org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@3b3fa8org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@1d04026_HPS_FORMAT_FIGEXP M_FIG O_FLOATNOGraphical abstract:C_FLOATNO Quantification of leaf-movement dynamics as a high-throughput proxy for plant physiological status, enabling early stress detection and timely intervention to mitigate yield penalties in CEA settings (image made with biorender.org). C_FIG