This ‘Fitbit’ for tree health saves homeowners money and helps fight climate change

ePlant technology provides homeowners with scientifically-backed conversational insights to improve the health and longevity of trees, delivered right to user smartphones. In other words, the data is drawn from an expansive algorithm of tree history, species habits, climate change, real-time weather conditions and more, but the information is relayed to the humans in this symbiotic relationship in “human” terms. Trees can tell homeowners and environmentalists at large when they need water, whether fertilizer is necessary, or when they’ve begun a gradual lean that means a potential uprooting could be developing.

We all have the best intentions when planting and maintaining trees, but most of us don’t have the green thumb that these majestic species require. We water too much or too little, plant with too much sun or not enough, and never know when to fertilize or prune a tree, if it’s even necessary at all. In fact, up to 50% of urban and household trees can die by age seven. That’s a loss for the tree, our property values, and the planet.

The average cost of tree planting is $300, with most homeowners spending between $150 and $1,850 to purchase a tree and have a landscaper or arborist plant it, according to landscaping experts.

“Planting trees is vital to combating climate change, but we need to keep them alive. Alas, most of us aren’t tree care experts. So our trees can end up neglected, unwatered or unhealthy,” says Graham Hine, co-founder and CEO at ePlant.

“Sometimes we end up having to pay someone to remove them. When we do that, we’ve wasted the resources we spent to help them grow, we lose the value they brought to us, and we lose time in the years and years it takes to grow another tree,” Hine said.

Importantly, we should all feel empowered to parent trees for a long life. Our planet depends on it. Keeping trees alive can feel like a full-time job, and it shouldn’t. It should be a joy to help them and interact with them.

And while the potential benefits to homeowners can’t be downplayed, the global impact from listening to trees can be key to vulnerable states like California, ravaged by wildfires in recent years and more recently, struggling with the effects of drought and then, this past winter’s precipitation deluge. The combination can result in washing away whole stands of trees, which is dangerous for those living nearby and an ecological tragedy.

At a larger scale, ePlant’s tree monitoring system is being used by organizations, including California Polytechnic State University, Stanford University, University of California, Davis, University of California, Riverside, and the city of San Luis Obispo.

“The sensors allowed us to see how trees respond to water in ways we never had before, which was invaluable to our research objectives. The data output from the sensors are intuitive and easy to understand, making them a fun way for students to get involved in our research,” says Natalie Love, PhD, a Frost Postdoctoral Research and Teaching Fellow at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, Calif.

“The sensors will improve our ability to detect and monitor tree health, especially in situations when trees are at risk like during construction or road modification,” she said. “The sensors are capable of detecting problems with trees long before symptoms appear to the observer, and because of this we believe they will have a strong and positive impact on urban forestry.”

For the ePlant team, it’s the unobtrusive size of the device, its link to the smartphones most of us rely on and its relative low cost compared to tree replacement that elevates the product.

“We were looking for a sensor that can give us the broad health of a tree, help us identify risks for a tree and do it in a way that was inexpensive enough to be accessible to the average consumer, and at the same time, a device that an agricultural user could deploy at scale and en masse,” Hine told MarketWatch.

“Products out there before have been lab-experiment kinds of sensors. They’re awesome. They’re super techy, wired to a power source. And they’re expensive. TreeTag takes two hours to install. It’s solar-powered and rechargeable,” he said.

Hine and ePlant are offering a promotional rate of $149 ($100 off full price of $249) for the technology. ePlant’s TreeTags will ship beginning in November 2023.

So how does it work? The AI-powered TreeTag sensor system provides insights and real-time monitoring to get proactive guidance into: 

• Irrigation: Information about the right amount of water to use and when it’s needed 

• Leaning: Is your tree leaning since that last rainstorm? Could it fall? The accelerometer tells you how the tree has tilted over time.

• Environment: What is your tree’s microenvironment, and how is it responding to changes?

• Growth: How is your tree growing, and when? How does that translate to carbon capture? Remember: Trees draw Earth-warming carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through a process called photosynthesis. Plants use photosynthesis to produce various carbon-based sugars necessary for tree functioning and to make wood for growth. Every part of a tree stores carbon, from the trunks, branches, leaves, and roots.

• General advice: How to mulch, when to fertilize, how to prune and where to plant. Your tree knows best about what it needs.

Hine told MarketWatch that landscaping professionals generally welcome the technology and empowering homeowners to better understand their gardens and yards. That’s because arborists and other pros are often called in when it’s too late to save a tree, and tree removal isn’t why they got into the business.

Plus, according to Hine, using sensors selectively can also tell us a lot about the health of nearby trees, depending on how homogenous a particular stand of trees is.

“The advantage of our inexpensive sensor for a farmer is that they can actually put in fiber stakes and afford to do it for less than the historical ways of taking the same measurements, so they can over-sample and as a data nerd, I like over-sampling it just makes everything clearer about what’s going on,” Hine told MarketWatch.

“And that’s how we think about using the sensor because you know, trees are kind of the canary in the coal mine for climate here. You know, we’re burning like crazy in California. They’re falling down in these rainstorms. We need to figure out how to take care of them,” he said.

Hine said homeowners can be assured that personal data is protected. But the knowledge gained about trees can and must be shared.

“We want to be able to compare trees and want to be able to look at the forest and want to be able to see what’s happening with the planet because that’s critical information. And that’s what we’re asking our users to contribute to: participating in a citizen-scientist exercise.”