Correlation of gaseous emissions to water stress in tomato and maize crops: From field to laboratory and back

The application of Site Specific Crop Management consists in the knowledge of the soil variability. In particular, for a sustainable water management is fundamental to obtain differential responses in terms of selective irrigation, analyzing and evaluating the water content of the soil or the water requirement of the plants. The innovative contribution of this research lies in designing, developing and validating a technology platform consisting of a hardware for monitoring gaseous emissions, such as Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs), from the soil-plant-atmosphere system of intensive crops, i.e., tomato and maize. In order to evaluate the water content of these systems, we analyzed experimental data acquired in-situ by portable sensing units based on Metal-OXide (MOX) gas sensors, thus comparing the results with meteo-sat data and farming operations (e.g. irrigations, rainfalls or pesticide-based treatments). The experimentation has proved a dependence of gaseous emissions on the hydric/metabolic status of the plants together with a correlation between sensor signals collected and significant events for the crops.