Our Urban Discovery Trees are tall (100ft.) trees located around the urban and peri-urban area of Portland that are instrumented with cloud-based dataloggers, from ground to crown. These dataloggers measure meteorological conditions (such as air temp, wind speed, relative humidity), tree growth, and plant moisture parameters. We pair these measures with a number of physiological parameters that help us understand water stress and metabolism of urban trees, and how these parameters compare to trees in more remote forests.
We are using many of these parameters, paired with remote sensing datasets, as new metrics to determine early warning signs of canopy stress.
Urban trees have a story to share, much of this narrative is stored in plant traits such as wood (xylem), annual ring development, and leaves. Exploring these traits helps to build an understanding of plant stress and the ability of plants to adjust traits to changing climatic conditions. From a research perspective, we are using these urban trees to better understand how the composition of future forests may look, and which tree species may fare best under a changing climate. Our Discovery Trees program aims to provide a platform for engaging student-led research and creating interfaces through which the community can engage with these trees through smart phone and web applications.
For more information on Smart Trees, please contact Molly Baer Kramer.
Discovery Trees Team Members:
Kyle Blount
Jon Fink
Andrés Holz
Molly Baer Kramer
Jason Maxfield
Kevan Moffett
Garett Pignotti
Hannah Prather
Aaron Ramirez
Todd Rosenstiel
Vivek Shandas
Lea Wilson
See all Smart Trees Collaboratory members here.