TreeWatch.net: giving a voice to trees in a world of climate change

Kathy Steppe

Date: June 5, 2019
Time: 2 pm
Place: F 0.1 (Büsgenweg 1)

A worldwide network of trees equipped with sensors. Trees that tweet about how they experience changes in climate and (extreme) weather conditions. Sounds like fiction, but it is reality, and the key concept behind TreeWatch.net.
In this guest lecture, we will explore how trees can be used as biological indicators to answer climate-change related scientific and political questions. But we will also illustrate how the network can raise public awareness and teach youngsters by giving trees a voice. Enabling trees to talk and tweet about their health and functioning is crucial if we want to better understand and predict what will happen with the forests of the future.