Ultra-low-cost manual soil respiration chamber

Abstract. Soil respiration measurement is important to assess natural carbon dioxide production. The closed chamber technique allows relatively easy soil respiration monitoring. A planned spatially large-scale campaign incites us to implement our ultra-low-cost portative chamber The chamber itself is entirely built from commercial parts with little, easy-to-make, quick machining work. The resulting setup is an easy-to-operate standalone, robust device. Used sensors are cost-effective yet accurate digital sensors that were successfully checked against some reference sensors. All these characteristics made the described chamber accessible to build and use for a wide scientific and educational community. The wide interest aroused by this construction among our colleagues pushes us to share our achievements. In this short note, we describe this simple device along with used sensors and apparent respiration quotient tip.