Photo by Ted Boscia/College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.
From left, Vinay Pagay, Abraham Stroock and Alan Lakso examine a silicon wafer that will be used to build microsensors to monitor water stress in grapevines.Read full Cornell Chronicle article.
Alan Lakso, New York State Agricultural Experiment Station in Geneva and grad student Vinay Pagay are collaborating with Abraham Stroock, associate professor of chemical engineering to develop embedded microsensors that can measure real-time water stress in living plants. The sensors will help vintners “strike the precise balance between drought and overwatering — both of which diminish the quality of wine grapes.”
“Beyond winemaking, the technology has implications for manufacturing, food processing and electronics. Team member Taryn Bauerle, assistant professor of horticulture, described how such sensors could be implanted throughout trees in a forest ecosystem to measure water use and nutrient flow on a large scale with unprecedented accuracy. “All of these [researchers’] brains are coming together,” she said. “There’s no limit to where we can take this type of technology.”
Read full Cornell Chronicle article.