This Red Oak Tree Live-Tweets Insight About Global Warming

In the heart of a forest in central Massachusetts, one can locate a typical red oak tree. Its only distinguishing characteristic, aside from its old age, is that it tweets information about climate change.

The 87-foot Northern Red Oak tree has been live-tweeting the global warming crisis. The century-old oak’s social media debut was the brainchild of Harvard Forest postdoctoral fellow Tim Rademacher and is now a joint effort with Clarisse Hart, who oversees outreach and education for the forest.

“We’ve done the work as a team to equip the tree with a voice, which we decided made the most sense in the first person, and even with a personality, in order to make it relatable to a larger audience,” said Rademacher.

“But most importantly, our Witness Tree is an objectively data-driven account, which I expect will amplify messages on climate change. But we don’t decide what gets posted, the tree does.”

The tree has been live-tweeting the changes in the weather. This Northern Red Oak tree was fitted by a team from Harvard Forest with sensors, the information from which is sent into software to enable the tree to communicate.

In addition to a growth sensor that continuously monitors the tree, the Twitter tree features a sap flow sensor to measure how much liquid goes up and down the tree.

A camera that continuously takes photographs of the leaf canopy is also present. All of this information is combined to create a code, which is then posted on Witness Tree’s Twitter page.

The tree is about 100 years old and has been witness to various weather extremes. This tree was there and unharmed when the Great New England Hurricane struck in 1938.

Such cutting-edge techniques can not only demonstrate how quickly the climate is changing but also how urgent it is to take immediate action to safeguard trees that have been around for more than a century.