Because of the difficulty to quantify water consumption of a single tree, for irrigation scheduling, a series of techniques has appeared that directly measure the sap flow through the stem which can be related directly to transpiration. The objective of this work was to evaluate the performance of one of these methods, called heat dissipation probe method (HDP), in the measurement of sap flow using ‘Tahiti’ lemon trees. Experiments were installed in an orchard of young trees, located in the experimental farm of irrigation of ESALQ, in Piracicaba, São Paulo State, Brazil. The evaluation was carried out using two weight lysimeters. The results demonstrated that the method can be used to measure the transpiration in citrus; however, the accuracy depends on theoretical concepts that should be considered and of certain corrections that should be accomplished. Those considerations as well as the advantages and disadvantages of this method are discussed in this work.
citrus; sap flow; Granier probe
