Rising costs of electronics have resulted in many novel and routine ecological measurements becoming prohibitively expensive for many students and research programs. New open-source hardware and software are currently being developed and improved which promise to meaningfully reduce the costs of plant and soil measurements, even in remote outdoor settings. I will present two electronics projects developed by our lab: 1) measurement of xylem water potential via sub-micron changes in stem/branch/petiole diameter, and 2) estimation of xylem embolism vulnerability via sensing acoustic emissions, i.e., high frequency sounds emitted from xylem during cavitation (liquid → gas phase change). Additionally, I will present options and designs for field-rugged dataloggers that are capable of recording signals from a variety of open-source and proprietary sensors (soil moisture, wind speed, relative humidity, temperature), as well as improvements made to two other embolism detection devices – the leaf optical method (Brodribb et al. 2016), and the pneumatic method (Pereira et al. 2020). Plans and instructions for all hardware and software builds presented in this talk are freely available.
