The Shroom Room

Team Name: Silly Fungi's
Sponsor: Eric Bogatin

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When conducting experiments involving observing, measuring, and studying plants and fungi, one of the biggest challenges is observing and measuring the growth and location of the underground systems of roots and mycelium. In most scenarios, the best solution is to excavate the whole organism to take measurements, but when running experiments that need several data points over time, this quickly becomes impractical, as you'd have to start the whole experiment over each time you excavate, leading to much longer experimentation times or many more organisms growing at the same time. Using our system, this is no longer the case. The Shroomroom utilizes a technique known as "Electrical Resistivity Tomography": through sourcing and sinking currents of a microamp scale in particular patterns through a network of 32 electrodes inserted in the soil, and taking voltage measurements between other probes on the network, we can produce a 3D image of the resistivity of the soil, which allows us to visualize the growth of roots and mycelium as areas of decreasing resistivity.