David J. Castillo

David J. Castillo

Jan 28, 2024

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Initial tests in the field!

by Toby Sinkinson, Ross Satchel and David J. Castillo


We apologize for a long hiatus in our lab notes and updates. Lately Ross and Toby have been intensively working on a new version of the device that will provide major autonomy and further refinement during data retrieval.

Last Wednesday (01.24.24) we were at the DBG testing the sensors. At this stage some of the challenges of a multivariable sensor like ours, is the noise level coming from the surrounding that could pose some technical challenges to be faced in remote locations or diverse environments.









Here is a screenshot of the dashboard that we are developing to monitor changes in realtime.  

Dashboard in Grafana

For testing purposes, these readings occur every one minute.  We will be dialing that back for the experiment, especially after we determine how frequently these data points change in-situ. 

We plan to add an additional soil temperature sensor to this design, so we can monitor temps at 6” and 12” below ground (though open for suggestions for depth), moisture at 9”. The choice was based on some experiments that a friend in Tucson performed, I think with the guidance of Andrew Salywon at DBG.  The data in these graphs does not yet collect from pH and rainfall, though we will be adding those soon.


Different depths considered for the location of soil pH probes.

Solar prototype

If the study is interested in studying the data in another method, it is very simple to build a .csv file that has all of the datapoints. In the future a data integrated port could be incorporated into mobile devices apps for data sharing and quicker decision making.

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About This Project

Mycorrhizal communities are a fundamental mutualistic interaction between soil fungi and trees. However, the interaction between soil bacteria and mycorrhizal fungi is vastly unknown. Since these microorganisms have fundamental roles in carbon and nitrogen fixation, we would implement a biosensor device to assess the spatiotemporal distribution of mycorrhizal-bacterial species and how their diversity and abundance affect trees grown in challenging environments.


Blast off!

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