Technical report of the probe. From lab to field: Assessing the scalability of lysiphen lysimeters in Guatemala’s dry corridor (2025)

Lysimeters (“Lysiphen”) are automated weighing devices designed to help understand how much water a crop uses throughout its growth cycle. These devices estimate crop water use by continuously measuring small changes in weight associated with plant water loss and irrigation events. This information is combined with basic environmental measurements and transmitted wirelessly to an online platform, allowing users to remotely monitor crop water behavior and explore opportunities to improve irrigation management.

Originally developed and tested under greenhouse conditions, the devices showed promising results in controlled settings, highlighting their potential as an affordable and durable tool for agricultural research and irrigation planning. To explore their applicability under real farming conditions, four units were installed at the Digital Agroclimatic Plot in eastern Guatemala, a semi-arid region where water scarcity is a major constraint for crop production. The field evaluation focused on common bean, a crop widely grown by smallholder farmers, with the objective of assessing whether the technology could reliably support the estimation of crop water requirements outside controlled environments. This field deployment generated valuable insights into the performance and limitations of the devices under real-world conditions.