Resilient Rivers: Historical Lessons for Climate Adaptation and Sustainable Governance

As the planet heats up, plant scientists are racing to find drought-tolerant crop varieties in order to protect global food security. Professor Brodersen has invented a device that should speed up this process. Called the cavitation bubble manometer (CBM), it measures the turgor, or water pressure, inside leaves and roots. Changing cell turgor is a key way that plants react to environmental conditions. The device allows for scores of measurements each day—a vast improvement over current technologies that make 1-2 measurements daily. With this grant, researchers will use the CBM to lay the groundwork for studies of how plants respond to and recover from drought, plus screen crop varieties for the ones that perform best.

Participants

Craig Brodersen, Yale School of the Environment; Amir Pahlavan, Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science, Yale School of Engineering & Applied Science