#dendrometer

[dendrometer]

A stop motion grilled cheese I shot once for a work thing. Had to make a custom rig for it, then toasted it with a heat gun hehe 🙃

[rjzimmerman]

A Day in the Life of a Tree

Using new technology, researchers can watch as trees grow, shrink, drink, and breathe.

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.

Trees, it turns out, grow mostly at night. In May, after weeks of cool spring weather, the temperature in Brooklyn spiked above eighty degrees. Logging into the EcoSensor Network, I could see that, within a few days, the cells of the London plane tree in Prospect Park had begun to divide. Every night, the wood and bark of the cambium—the cellular tissue between a tree’s bark and wood—enlarged until the sun came up. Then, during the day, as the temperature increased, the tree went through small micron-level contractions—shrinkage caused by tension in its molecules as they pulled water up from the roots and delivered it to the leaves. In the sunlight, the pores of the leaves would open, letting the water out and the carbon dioxide in—a whole tree, from roots to branches, breathing.

[botanyone]

Open-Source Dendrometers for Real-Time Plant Water Monitoring

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…

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[itsmeasurex]

Our experience and capability in the realm of sensor innovation has settled on us an organization of decision for some corporates over the globe.MeasureX is a quickly developing worldwide supplier of weight, load, level and relocation frameworks.

[itsmeasurex]

Our experience and capability in the realm of sensor innovation has settled on us an organization of decision for some corporates over the globe. MeasureX is a quickly developing worldwide supplier of weight, load, level and relocation frameworks.

[itsmeasurex]

MeasureX offers a range of sensors including submersible level sensor, level transmitter, water level indicator, water level sensor and fuel tank level sensor. Send your enquiry to our sales department ([email protected]) or ask your technical questions from our support team ([email protected]).

Our experience and capability in the realm of sensor innovation has settled on us an organization of decision for some corporates over the globe.MeasureX is a quickly developing universal supplier of weight, load, level and removal frameworks.