TreeTalker

Martin Leberecht from my group has spend most of April in the Marburg Open Forest and the Kellerwald National Park to install our new TreeTalker devices just in time for bud flush kicking off the vegetation period. These devices are the backbone for our tree working package within the Nature4.0 project. They fit right in our logic of an IoT biodiversity monitoring system. Up to 25 trees send their measurements to a cloud where they are collected and uploaded to our database in nearly real time. On the one side we this way we will build up time-series information on a variety of tree phenotypes (bud burst, growth, sapflow, wood moisture etc.). On the other side, we can monitor in real-time how trees cope for example with the drought this spring.

Marburg Open Forest as test site

In our research site the Marburg Open Forest we now maintain a high density of TreeTalkers with more than 50 beech trees and 5 oaks on an area of about 200 ha. the rationale is that we want to analyse how many trees need to be included in such networks to get a good representation of a forest site. Also, we use these measurements to link them to aerial images, Lidar, and satellite images to derive new proxies that help us upscale the measurements from the TreeTalkers. Besides the TreeTalkers other work packages within Nature4.0 employ a variety of other sensors to monitor biodiversity, including birds, bads, and beetles.