Towards a Frugal Photosynthesis Sensing Toolkit for Data-Driven Plant Science Education and Exploration

Abstract

Rapid environmental change and advances in data-driven analysis highlight the need not only to use computational tools, but also to foster understanding of the natural world and inspire creativity. Photosynthesis, the process that fuels nearly all life on Earth, provides a compelling context for such learning, particularly in understanding how plants alter their photosynthetic strategies in response to environmental changes. However, existing tools for studying photosynthesis are often inaccessible or limited to demonstrating its presence, rather than capturing its temporal dynamics. We present PhytoBits, a frugal in situ gas-exchange sensing toolkit for distinguishing and teaching photosynthetic strategies. PhytoBits combines leaf enclosure with accessible materials, an off-the-shelf CO2 sensor, and a low-cost microcontroller, to support multi-day monitoring of plant gas-exchange in educational and research contexts. We validated PhytoBits against research-grade gas-exchange systems, confirming that it identifies C3 and CAM (Crassulacean Acid Metabolism) photosynthetic pathways. In addition to obligate CAM, PhytoBits also resolves facultative CAM and developmental CAM dynamics in plants. This work presents an early-stage hardware validation; user deployment studies, open-source code dissemination, and automated pathway classification are planned as future work.