Continuous monitoring of tree responses to climate change for smart forestry: a cybernetic web of trees

Trees are long-lived organisms that contribute to forest development over centuries and beyond. However, trees are vulnerable to increasing natural and anthropic disturbances. Spatially distributed, continuous data are required to predict mortality risk and impact on the fate of forest ecosystems. In order to enable monitoring over sensitive and often remote forest areas that cannot be patrolled regularly, early warning tools/platforms of mortality risk need to be established across regions. Although remote sensing tools are good at detecting change once it has occurred, early warning tools require ecophysiological information that is more easily collected from single trees on the ground. Here, we discuss the requirements for developing and implementing such a treebased platform to collect and transmit ecophysiological forest observations and environmental measurements from representative forest sites, where the goals are to identify and to monitor ecological tipping points for rapid forest decline. Long-term monitoring of forest research plots will contribute to better understanding of disturbance and the conditions that precede it. International networks of these sites will provide a regional view of susceptibility and impacts and would play an important role in ground-truthing remotely sensed data.