For these reasons, monitoring the response of the entire plant to water status based on stem diameter variation has become popular in the field of irrigation management worldwide. The continuous control of plant water status is crucial, particularly under deficit irrigation conditions, to prevent a moderate and potentially beneficial water stress from becoming too severe and reducing yield. Since the plant water status controls many physiological processes and crop productivity, this information can be highly useful in irrigation scheduling. Most of these methods require destruction of plant tissue and all provide intermittent and localized measurements rather than continuous and nondestructive monitoring of plant water status, which may have curtailed the adoption of these techniques for the calculation of irrigation requirements for large areas of farmland.Ī reliable index of plant water status can only be obtained from plant measurements. Pre-dawn leaf water potential is frequently used, while other indicators such as stem water potential, vapor diffusion methods and relative leaf water content have been adopted. However, there has been no general agreement on the most suitable indicator. Numerous methods of measuring plant water status are recognized among scholars and experts. Such a method is needed for studying the influence of various environmental factors on water status and subsequent plant growth. Therefore, a simple, stable, nondestructive method of continuous monitoring of plant water status has long been sought in research on soil-water-plant relations. The monitoring of plant water status provides an important source of information for irrigation scheduling. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: The data are all contained within the paper.įunding: The study was financially supported by the earmarked fund for the National High Technology Research and Development Program of China (863 Program of China, grant numbers: 2011AA100509), key and Open Laboratory of Crop Water Requirements Regulation, Ministry of Agriculture, and the funds of Chinese farmland ecosystem research station in open country in Shang Qiu.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. Received: ApAccepted: JanuPublished: February 3, 2017Ĭopyright: © 2017 Meng et al. Pardha-Saradhi, University of Delhi, INDIA (2017) Suitable indicators using stem diameter variation-derived indices to monitor the water status of greenhouse tomato plants. Our results suggest that SDV-derived indicators can be used for determining plant water status and for scheduling irrigation at different growth/developmental stages.Ĭitation: Meng Z, Duan A, Chen D, Dassanayake KB, Wang X, Liu Z, et al. Regression analysis showed that the SD 6 (the difference between the stem diameter value at 06:00 am and the initial sensor reading) was closely related to the SWC (p<0.01) during rapid vegetative growth, whereas the MDS (the maximum daily shrinkage) was closely related to the SWC (p<0.01) during slow vegetative growth. The SWC was controlled at 70–80% (well-watered), 60–70% (slightly deficit watered), 50–60% (moderately deficit watered) of the field capacity (FC), and the prescribed growing stages were vegetative, flowering and fruit-forming, and harvesting stages. The experiment was designed as a two-factor randomized block using the SWC and growth stages as variables. This study was conducted to determine suitable SDV (stem diameter variation)-derived indices as indicators of tomato plant water status for irrigation scheduling. Changes in stem diameter in response to plant water status and soil water content (SWC) were experimentally investigated during the growing seasons of 013 in pot-cultivated tomato ( Lycopersicon esculentum L.) plants in a plastic greenhouse. It is very important to seek a simple nondestructive method to continuously measure plant water status for irrigation scheduling.
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