BioT

Trees can tell you when they're thirsty.

BioT's sensors measure a tree's own stem — the same water reserve it draws on before any visible sign of stress — so growers can irrigate from evidence, not a calendar.

Stem radius, one week Kasama, Zambia

A living tree's daily rhythm: the stem contracts through the day as the crop draws water, and recovers overnight. A shallower recovery, night after night, is the earliest sign of drought stress — visible here well before it shows in the canopy.

What the sensor actually measures

A linear dendrometer clamps gently around the trunk and tracks its diameter to within a few microns — small enough to register the tree's daily intake and release of water, long before drought stress becomes visible above ground.

Stem & canopy

Micron-scale stem displacement, air temperature, humidity, and vapour pressure deficit, read every 15 minutes.

LoRaWAN, not Wi-Fi

Each node runs for months on a single charge and reports over long-range radio, so sensors work as well at the far edge of a plantation as they do beside the gateway.

A number you can act on

Raw displacement is converted into tree water deficit and daily shrinkage — the same indicators used in peer-reviewed dendrometry — shown per tree, per block, per pivot.

Built for the field, not the lab bench

BioT's dendrometers are currently deployed across a commercial coffee plantation in Zambia, monitoring individual trees against the plantation's irrigation pivots so agronomists can see how each zone is actually responding to water, not just how much water it received.

Every reading is timestamped at the network, not on the device — so a sensor with a drifting clock still lines up correctly against every other tree on the same chart.

Published research
Erasmus et al., Data in Brief, 2024
Erasmus et al., Measurement, 2026

Talk to the team about a deployment.