Irrigation with Sap Flow Sensors Explained

growers and irrigation managers need to answer two questions how much and when to irrigate hello my name is dr michael foster from implex and today i'm going to show you how the implex sat flow sensor can be used for irrigation management to answer these two questions so first of all what is sap flow so sap flow is simply the water flow within plants and the reason why we call it sap rather than water is because the the fluid has other things in it it has nutrients and hormones and it's not pure water so that's why we call it sap flow and not water flow so the sap flow occurs throughout the plant in the roots trunks branches and pedials and within the plant it occurs in the xylem or specifically the sapwood of the xylem so this is where we are most interested to measure in the sapwood where the subflow is flowing so sap flow is often synonymous with other concepts such as stomatal conductance and transpiration and evapotranspiration so we loosely use these terms together to sort of mean the same thing which is the plant water use or the the plant water relations so sap flow is not stomata conductance and it's not strictly transpiration and or evapotranspiration either but we do loosely use these terms together to to mean the same thing and what that essentially means is crop water use or plant water use so when we're talking about saplo what we're really talking