Forests have a complex relationship with climate change. On the one hand, they absorb atmospheric carbon, even proliferating in changing climates. On the other hand, they can suffer a higher thermal stress, degrading their carbon storage capacity and their resistance to drought. With about $10.5 million in funding from the German Research Foundation, scientists in Europe will now instrument forests with new sensors to better understand how forests are affected by climate change.
Combining forest science with Internet of Things (IoT) technology, drones and other devices, EcoSense will seek to illuminate the effects of climate change on the interactions between plants, soil and the atmosphere. These interactions vary by species, location, and forest, which refers to collections of trees in a forest that are fairly uniform in age, size, distribution, and other factors. The EcoSense initiative will bring new technologies to forest monitoring following efforts such as Harvard University’s Wired Forest.
“We don’t understand when and why climate extremes, such as heat waves or droughts, cause single trees or forest fragments to exceed their tipping points.”
Specifically, the project will study the abiotic and biotic processes of carbon and water exchange in forests, how the ecosystem responds to environmental stressors, allowing the prediction of process-based changes in the function and sustainability of the ecosystem, according to an outline of the project. Real-time sensor network data will be transferred to a database for analysis and deep learning simulation models to generate short- and medium-term predictions.
“Climate change already has a huge impact on forest ecosystems. We see an increase in tree mortality worldwide,” said Christiane Werner, professor of ecosystem physiology at the Institute of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Freiburg, noting the effects of the European drought of 2018 on trees. “Currently, we have well-established models for predicting global ecosystem functioning under unstressed conditions, but we do not understand when and why climate extremes, such as heat waves or droughts, cause single trees or forest fragments exceed their tipping points.”
Internet of Woody Things
The research team will instrument several mountainous hectares of the Black Forest in southwestern Germany, covering stands of pure beech, pure spruce and mixed trees. Climate changes in the forest can have wider repercussions; the forest is of economic and tourist importance to Germany, famous for its traditional farmhouses, cuckoo clocks and namesake ham and pie.
The EcoSense toolkit could include carbon dioxide (CO2) sensors, camera-equipped drones and other devices. The team will initially deploy commercially available devices and then, starting in 2024, replace them with newly developed microsensors, some of which will be energy autonomous, according to Ulrike Wallrabe, a professor in the Department of Microsystems Engineering at the University of Freiburg.
“We want to measure fluxes of water, isotope-discriminated CO2 and volatile organic compounds and stress markers, mainly photosynthetic efficiency by chlorophyll fluorescence from soils to the atmosphere,” said Wallrabe. “The sensor network will include new, compact and, where possible, energy autonomous sensors that will be developed in the project.”
Daniel Kneeshaw, a forestry and climate change researcher at the University of Quebec in Montreal who is not affiliated with EcoSense, said the project is examining interesting parameters that should be useful to a wide variety of researchers.
“As the researchers suggest, what happens at the cellular scale when scaled up can have profound impacts across regions,” Kneeshaw said, adding that she wants to know how the EcoSense data will be scaled up and down. . “A better understanding of the mechanisms will help us be better prepared for future changes. Having these networks around the world and getting scientists from the different networks to talk [about them] will lead to even stronger results and interpretations.”
The EcoSense project aims to start publishing studies in 2023, but some affiliated groups have already started publishing the results. For example, one group including Werner published a paper on a self-contained, wireless chlorophyll fluorometer that measures the efficiency of photosynthesis in plants. With a range of 10 kilometers, the new device can be attached anywhere in a tree and is low-power and relatively inexpensive.
In addition to its initial 4-year funding, EcoSense has the option of two 4-year extensions for a long-term perspective. Researchers have high expectations for meaningful results.
“Our special feature is the unique alignment of ecosystem research with microsystems technology. Distributed autonomous sensing principles will open a new door for ecosystem research,” said Werner. “We will achieve unprecedented cross-scale coverage, both spatially, from leaf to forest, and in a temporal dimension, from minutes to years, of processes and interactions that drive carbon and water fluxes, including stress markers as volatile organic compounds and chlorophyll fluorescence”.
—Tim Hornyak (@robotopia), science writer
Citation: Hornyak, T. (2022), Scientists bring forests into the Internet of Things, Eos, 103, published 1 August 2022. Text © 2022. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 Except where otherwise noted, images are copyrighted. Any reuse without the express permission of the copyright owner is prohibited.