smart urban forests at ceres

A new Swinburne University-led pilot program introduced at CERES Community Environment Park is using water-sensor technology to better manage urban forests.

A new Swinburne University-led pilot program introduced at CERES Community Environment Park is using water-sensor technology to better manage urban forests.

The sensors are an initiative designed to create healthier and more resilient urban forests where park managers and city residents can follow the progress of the trees via digital platforms that are informed by real-time water use and water-stress data. The real-time water use is measured by the ICT International SFM1 Sap Flow Meters.

Dr Rayburg says it’s the first project of its type in the world.

“These sensors have previously been used in agriculture and plant biology, but never before in an urban forest management setting,” says Dr Rayburg.

“The project is transformational. Instead of trees dying at 80 years of age because they are spending their whole lives in water stress, they’ll live to be two or three or maybe even four hundred years old. That matters because when we lose a tree in an urban landscape we lose habitat, we lose cooling, we lose a part of ourselves, and people have a really visceral connection to trees.”

The project entails installing ‘water use’ and ‘water stress’ sensors on the trees to provide real-time watering data.

This data will also determine the most suitable species for current and future climates and allow urban forest managers to decide if, when and how much water to apply to their trees.

Talking Trees

After the installation of the sensors, Dr Rayburg and his team will design an app that allows people to ‘talk’ to trees and have the trees ‘talk’ back, engaging citizens in urban forest management.

Some local councils already provide datasets and updates on their urban forests, but the team is thinking bigger than this.

“The City of Melbourne has a platform called Urban Forest Visual that allows people to send an email to a tree and then somebody from the City of Melbourne responds to the email,” Dr Rayburg says. “This has been really popular, which demonstrates the desire people have to interact with nature, even in cities.”

“We want to take this to the next level; instead of a person responding, we want the tree to respond.”

The app will allow you to contact a tree and ask it how it’s going. It will collate the data being collected and send back an instant response, which might be “hey, I’m going great” or “I’m feeling a bit stressed today, could you please give me some water?”

Dr Rayburg hopes the app will engage citizens and take some of the pressure off councils being the only managers.

Spreading the word

CERES, a Centre for Education and Research in Environmental Strategies located in Brunswick East Melbourne, currently has nine of the sensors instrumented across three tree species, including two Eucalypt species and Casuarinas. They are developing educational materials about the project in the hope of building up community interest and spreading the message.

“We want people to start talking about it. We should have these sensors in every urban forest in the world.”

Dr Rayburg

To extend this work and to help develop the app that will allow people to “talk to trees”, Swinburne University has created a project with GlobalGiving. GlobalGiving provides a platform by which individual and corporate donors can contribute funds to projects they want to see happen. Our project is titled: Growing Smart Urban Forests and the link to our GlobalGiving page can be found here. We would very much welcome your support.

This is another Smart Urban Forest Application.

If you would like any further information on this project or on ICT International Instrumentation, please send an email to: sales@ictinternational.com.au

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This article originally appeared in the ICT International Newsletter on 3/12/18