Plant Sciences Commons^™

Automated Mini-Channel Platform For Studying Plant Root Environments, Kevin F. Kreis

Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Plants are crucial to our lives; they provide us with building materials, oxygen, and food. A season’s crop yield can be significantly affected by local environmental factors. Farming practices currently focus on using fertilizer, pesticides, monitoring water availability, and genetic modification of the plant to increase crop yield. Improving fundamental understanding of plant root interactions with their local soil environment, or rhizosphere, will help improve crop yield. Studying such interactions is challenging because roots are underground, making it difficult to observe interactions and to manipulate the local soil environment.

The goal of this thesis is to develop an automated mini-channel …