ExactH2O brings laboratory-grade water measurement into living systems — greenhouses, field plots, and phenotyping chambers — enabling researchers and growers to observe, quantify, and respond to plant water status in real time.
ExactH2O was engineered for greenhouse research where precise water control matters most—from controlled drought experiments to high-throughput phenotyping. Each deployment can be tailored for sensor configuration, irrigation setpoints, sampling frequency, and data integration, while the ExactH2O platform delivers a unified stream of real-time measurements and irrigation control.
Precisely control and measure substrate water content to induce, maintain, and recover from defined drought stress levels. ExactH2O enables researchers to hold volumetric water content at any target percentage across replicated pots simultaneously — eliminating the variability that undermines stress experiment reproducibility. Continuous logging captures the full stress trajectory from imposition through relief, allowing correlation with physiological indicators like stomatal conductance, chlorophyll fluorescence, and biomass accumulation.
Integrate substrate water data into high-throughput phenotyping pipelines to disentangle genetic variation from environmental noise. When every genotype in a diversity panel experiences a rigorously identical water regime, differences in growth rate, leaf area, transpiration efficiency, and stress tolerance become attributable to genetics — not watering inconsistency. ExactH2O provides the environmental ground truth that makes phenotyping data scientifically defensible.
Deploy sensor networks across greenhouse benches and raised beds to maintain irrigated targets with closed-loop precision. Built for research greenhouse facilities, ExactH2O combines automated irrigation, continuous monitoring, and anomaly detection to support complex experimental workflows. Multi-zone control enables simultaneous experiments within the same facility while preserving independent treatments and data quality.
ExactH2O brings precision agriculture to the greenhouse through continuous root-zone monitoring, automated irrigation decisions, and actionable time-series data. By improving irrigation scheduling and supporting soil-specific calibration, the platform makes each watering decision more precise and data-driven.
Every design decision in ExactH2O was made with experimental rigor as the primary constraint. The result is a system that satisfies both peer-reviewer scrutiny and practical field deployment.
Researchers at Michigan State University used the ExactH2O irrigation platform to study how drought timing affects switchgrass physiology, metabolism, and downstream biofuel production. Plants were grown in 8-liter pots under greenhouse conditions and assigned to well-watered control, vegetative drought, flowering drought, or senescence drought treatments.
The system was used to monitor soil moisture content and irrigate individual pots when soil moisture fell below programmed thresholds. Control plants were maintained at 25% VWC, while drought treatments were reduced to 1% VWC during specific developmental stages and then re-watered.
Continuous soil moisture control allowed researchers to impose precise developmental stage-specific drought and connect those treatments to gas exchange, chlorophyll fluorescence, metabolomics, biomass composition, and fermentation outcomes. The study showed that switchgrass maintained biomass under severe short-term drought, while drought timing strongly influenced metabolic responses and biofuel yield.
ExactH2O serves any operation where water quantity in the substrate must be known, controlled, or documented — from a single growth chamber to a multi-acre research farm.