SBIR-STTR Award

Devices resulting from this development will greatly enhance the development of food crops designed for effective water utilization and thus facilitate the genetic improvement in food yield per volume of water. Efficient use of water in agriculture can be facilitated through accurate root zone water content monitoring and control. Crop yields and crop quality can benefit through the prevention of drought and over-watering. Outside of agriculture, watershed management can become much more effective. Flood and mudslide forecasting can be facilitated. Earth-filled dams, levees and canal banks can be effectively monitored for conditions leading to failure. World-wide soil water resource accounting can be facilitated using these devices as ground truthing elements for space-based ground penetrating radar.

Researchers who develop high water use efficiency plants are in great need of precisely monitoring the uptake of water by their prototype plants at various segments of its root zone. They need to know how each plant variation utilizes water in producing food and from where the water is drawn. Currently they have no accurate options for getting this data. This device will provide a new, accurate tool for studying the water use efficiency and zone of water consumption of various developing plant types. This will increase the efficiency and reduce the cost of developing high water use efficient plants. In other uses the device can provide accurate soil water monitoring for controlling crop irrigation - thus conserving large amounts of irrigation water.