Have you ever put trees and electricity together? The two seem like polar opposites to some, but in the past few years there has been quite a bit of research that links the two together.
In the later part of 2008, scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) reported that they had tapped into the very small electrical currents carried in trees and created a company to use it as a power source, according to Discovery News. The company, called Voltree, works with the U.S. Forestry Service to create sensors that use the electrical power generated by the trees to monitor temperature and humidity conditions inside forests. The goal is to provide forest managers, as well as firefighters, the tools to better predict and monitor forest fires.
According to Ground Report, the power derived from the trees would run those low-power transmitters at predictable times. The trees would then relay the information from one tree to another until the data collects at a specific location. Once the data has been compiled, it would be sent to the National Interagency Fire Center in Idaho via satellite, Popular Mechanics reports.
We here at Cartwright Tree Care think it’s really neat that trees have the ability to power their own wildfire sensors. When you think of all the trees that could be saved using this technology, it seems worth the effort to put it into place, doesn’t it?
Photo credit: Christopher Huang / MIT via Discovery News.