Five years ago, a 38-year-old lady was holding one of her twin infants while watching a concert outdoors with her family. It had been windy and rainy the week before, but today the weather was pleasant and the concert was full. Unexpectedly, a 270-year-old nembutsu tree toppled on the woman, trapping her after the other concertgoers were unable to free her in time. Despite twice-yearly examinations where the tree showed no obvious indicators of concern, this tragedy nonetheless occurred.
Officials in Singapore seek to prevent incidents like these by constructing an Internet of Trees. Around 5.5 million people live on the tropics island nation’s 7 million trees, 6 million of which Singapore’s National Parks Board tracks so they may be managed remotely via an app. (We will suppose that the other million trees are too young to join the fun just yet because the Board only tracks trees once they have grown to a particular size.)
While tree-triggered deaths are fairly few and far between, there are plenty of other ‘tree incidents’ that can occur, such as a branch falling, or a tree trunk snapping or uprooting. Depending on the size of the branch, this can be a dangerous nuisance as it could block roads, obscure signage, or destroy property. Thanks to the efforts of the National Parks Board, these incidents have dropped from around 3,000 per year at the turn of the millennium to under 500 per year today.
A Twin for Every Tree
This all may sound like a new-ish endeavor, but it may surprise you to learn that the program started 20 years ago when arborists geo-tagged the extant trees. Since then, they have kept up as technology progressed — geo-tagging via machine learning began about five years back, and is now automated.
Singapore’s National Parks Board monitors the trees by creating a digital twin of each one using LiDAR point clouds and artificial intelligence to do geo-location. This way, many aspects of a tree’s health can be analyzed from an air-conditioned office — a valuable asset in a place where it’s always summer.
The Board then takes the digital twins and applies finite element models to them in order to assess the tree’s overall stability — factors such as the tree’s architecture, wood strength, and the available space for roots — with regard to different weather conditions. Although it’s perpetually summer in Singapore, the country experiences its share of intense, tree-twisting tropical storms each year.
A special drill for measuring tree density.
A tilt sensor monitors the angle of a mossy tree.
Along with examining the trees from the comfort of air-conditioned offices, the organization also monitors them physically and in the field using special drills that measure the density of trees and can detect cavities. If this rings a bell, it’s likely because of [John Opsahl] ’sOpenDendrometer, which was a finalist in the Climate-Resilient Communities Challenge of the 2022 Hackaday Prize. Among other things, OpenDendrometer can help determine whether a tree is experiencing water stress, or if the growth rate has slowed over time.
Given that we rely on trees for shade, oxygen, food, and visual appeal, it makes perfect sense to monitor them even though they don’t move around much. Hopefully, this plants a seed in the minds of other governments.
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