#dendrometer

We learn about a new technology that is in use today to study trees. It’s a “precision dendrometer,” described in the extract below. The author does a fascinating thing with his reading of the measurements produced by the dendrometer, and the things that are happening around us as we sit under or look at a tree......such as a rain storm. Finally, I can tie together that with which I’m familiar, a tree in a rainstorm, with something that teaches scientists about that tree during that rainstorm. Nice to be able to see integration of science and humanity, in an essay.

Equipped with a tiny spring, a transducer—which converts, or “transduces,” physical motion into an electrical signal—can rest on the bark of a tree, sensing and logging tiny changes in pressure. Instruments that use this approach, known as precision dendrometers, allow scientists to do something entirely new: watch how trees change and respond to their environments on an instantaneous scale.

The article also tells us how this new tool is important in relating trees and climate change, and quantify how they are our friends.

More excerpt from this New Yorker story:

One morning earlier this summer, the sun rose over Brooklyn’s Prospect Park Lake. It was 5:28 a.m., and a black-crowned night heron hunched into its pale-gray wings. Three minutes later, the trunk of a nearby London plane tree expanded, growing in circumference by five-eighths of a millimetre. Not long afterward, a fish splashed in the lake, and the tree shrunk by a quarter of a millimetre. Two bullfrogs erupted in baritone harmony; the tree expanded. The Earth turned imperceptibly, the sky took on a violet hue, and a soft rain fell. Then the rain stopped, and the sun emerged to touch the uppermost canopy of the tree. Its trunk contracted by a millimetre. Then it rested, neither expanding or contracting, content, it seemed, to be an amphitheatre for the birds.

“I wonder about the trees,” Robert Frost wrote. Monumental in size, alive but inert, they inhabit a different temporality than ours. Some species’ life spans can be measured in human generations. We wake to find that a tree’s leaves have turned, or register, come spring, its sturdier trunk. But such changes are always perceived after the fact. We’ll never see them unfold, with our own eyes, in human time.

Scientists have long sought new ways to continuously monitor how changing water availability affects plants. Traditional methods of measuring water potential, a key indicator of plant water stress, require invasive sampling that damages tissue. Now researchers have developed entirely open-source instruments capable of tracking plant water status with unprecedented high frequency and…