Giancarlo Foderà

The trees of planet Earth are suffering. Not least due to climate change and rising temperatures, dry periods are becoming more frequent, which ultimately lead to forest fires or forest dieback, reduced harvests and also drought stress for urban trees. Urban trees in particular not only play an important role in the overall appearance of a community or city, but also have important functions in making cities more livable. These include, above all, improving air quality, lowering outdoor temperatures, and we humans are also directly affected. Urban irrigation is designed to be ad hoc and not precise. However, it should be tailored to the tree's individual needs based on tree species, drought period, tree size, irradiation, and water storage capacity of soil or substrate. To make arboriculture more efficient for urban trees, Treesense has developed Treesense Pulse – the wearable for trees. Treesense Pulse is a sensor that innovatively monitors the water balance and thus the health and maintenance needs of the trees. Very specifically, the sensor measures a type of electrical resistance in the xylem part of woody plants. This part is responsible for water transport from the roots to the tree crown. Simply spoken: The more active the tree, the more water flows through the xylem channels and the more water in the xylem channels the lower the electrical resistance. This measurement is taken periodically, every 10 minutes, creating a curve that is then used in further analyses to monitor tree health and necessary maintenance measures in real-time. On a platform, the Treesense Cloud, a predictive maintenance tool is thus provided on the basis of collected data on the urban green. With the data collected, that is, coupling the individual "heart rate" of the representative trees with external information from weather-related data, it is possible to understand exactly how tree health is evolving in real time and maintenance needs are predicted beforehand.