The TREETALKER® Network: Let’s trees talk about climate
Riccardo Valentini1,2,3, Simona Castaldi4, Ivan Vasenev5, Alexis M. Yaroslavtsev5 & Olga V. Nesterova3
1Euro-Mediterranean Centre for Climate Change (CMCC), Lecce, Italy 2University of Tuscia, Tuscia, Italy 3Far Eastern Federal University, Vladivostok, Russia 3Second University of Naples, Naples, Italy 3Russian Timiryazev State Agrarian University, Russia
Extensive tree mortality and widespread forest dieback linked to drought and temperature stress is an increasing and emergent concern in all vegetated continents. One of the main limit for a full comprehension of the climate-tree relationship, is the lack of a sufficient number of experimental datasets at regional and sub-regional scale which can provide long term and high frequency data necessary to analyze the coherent spatial-temporal patterns of tree response and climate variability for a significant number of species (Anderegg et al., 2013a, SteinKamp and Hickler, 2015). Recently Internet of Things technologies (IoT) have grown rapidly and represent today a unique opportunity for improving our environmental monitoring capabilities at extremely low cost. For this purpose we want to start with the equipment of 3000 individual trees organized in 150 forest sites, distributed across the most vulnerable and representative forests of the world, starting from boreal forests to temperate and tropical region.
To this purpose we have developed a single device (TreeTalker®) which include a set of sensors capable to monitor plant water status and growth, continuously at a sub-hour frequency (every 15 minutes). The TreeTalker® device is able to monitor: the water transport inside the tree; the diameter growth; the quantity and quality of tree foliage and climate and soil parameters (temperature, humidity). Each equipped tree with TreeTalker® is able to transmit high frequency data on the WEB cloud with a unique IoT identifier allowing to follow the individual tree life along its development from hours to season and inter-annual time scales. We will make use of such network architecture to create a unique in the world environmental network that will be able to constantly monitor individual tree functions and climate parameters.