Session: : Interdisciplinary Tools to Advance Ecology 3
COS 86-3 - The Tree Observatory: A platform for raising awareness and improving our understanding of whole tree biology, particularly solitary individuals
Abstract: While the ability to gather many different types of high resolution data using satellites and drones is generating rich databases for monitoring change and modeling response, our ability to measure and integrate the physiology and detailed response of individual trees remains limited. This lack of detailed understanding of tree physiological behavior leads to a gap in general understanding and awareness of how individual trees function. The majority of this detailed physiological work is conducted in ‘natural’ settings while the most vulnerable trees that have direct impact on quality of human life are in cities, planted individually. Our goal is to promote whole tree biology, particularly of solitary trees, through the integration of long-term and high resolution physiological data and raise general awareness of the dynamic nature of tree physiology and how it relates to tree health. We emphasize solitary trees as an experimental control to understanding the community effects of trees in forests. We challenge engineering students and their advisors to devise improved means for collecting data and samples. Our approach combines numerous automatic sensors that continuously and simultaneously collect physiological data for long periods of time on a small number of trees. We routinely create 3D datasets of the tree, using photogrammetry, to monitor tree growth and vigor. We test new technologies to examine tradeoffs in labor, cost, and data quality over daily, seasonal, and annual cycles. To share this data with a broad audience, we create easily understood but informative visualizations of integrated physiological and environmental data. Here we show various observations from several years of detailed monitoring of six individual trees, each a different species, focused on combining daily water use dynamics and detailed stem size fluctuations with weather data and phenological observations. These results are put in the context of tree structure and its temporal change. We discuss projects with engineers to develop new tools for tree science. In conclusion, we demonstrate the power of long-term monitoring programs to create insight into the dynamics of ‘whole tree biology’ and broader impacts in general understanding. Solitary trees play a major role in the built environment and can contribute to our understanding of forest communities. We discuss how this can be communicated to the general public, highlighting the wonder of tree biology and the gaps in our knowledge. We hope to duplicate these efforts at other public gardens and sites to create a network of observatories.
