Climate change makes water stress a more prominent obstacle to maintaining the same yield and quality of harvestable crop biomass for consumers, posing a unique challenge to farmers who must compete for clean water resources with other stakeholders. Thus, farmers must adapt their irrigation strategies to remain profitable and relevant. Basil is a tender perennial crop from the family Lamiaceae that is grown as a culinary herb and as a source of essential oils. Sweet basil (Ocimum basilicum) is a model crop for understanding water stress in economically important crops due to its intolerance to drought stress and its unique phytochemical properties. Sweet basil produces different concentrations of different secondary metabolites in response to abiotic stress, such as eugenol and methyl chavicol. This study seeks to understand what chemical and physical changes occur to sweet basil under water stress within a greenhouse environment. Three different treatments of water stress controlled via drip irrigation and a separate control group were used to analyze the yield and secondary metabolite production within sweet basil. Wet weight, dry weight, height, and phytochemical concentrations were calculated for the different drought treatments. There was a significant relationship between the final height, dry and wet yield, and chemical concentration of the different water stress treatments. One of the most interesting findings of the study was that the high note of sweet basil, a phenylpropanoid known as eugenol, was found in similarly high concentrations throughout the different treatment groups. There were significant differences in concentration across terpenoids such as eucalyptol, germacrene D, and linalool. This study showed that there were significant effects on the yield and concentration of phytochemicals produced by sweet basil from drought stress.
