Introducing a sensor to measure budburst and its environmental drivers

Area of Science:

• Plant science
• Ecology
• Climate change biology

Background:

• Budburst is a crucial adaptive trait for understanding plant responses to climate change.
• Acquiring budburst data is challenging due to a lack of simultaneous environmental stimulus information at the individual plant level.
• Phenotyping plants in natural populations is difficult because of environmental variation.

Purpose of the Study:

• To design and evaluate a sensor for measuring budburst timing and key environmental drivers (temperature, photoperiod) on temperate woody plants in situ.
• To address the need for concurrent measurement of environmental drivers and plant phenotypes in natural populations for genomic studies.

Main Methods:

• Developed a sensor for attachment to tree branches to measure budburst, temperature, and photoperiod.
• Validated sensor performance against time-lapse photography and environmental sampling instruments.
• Assessed the sensor's potential influence on budburst timing in Populus clones.

Main Results:

• The sensor's temperature measurements closely matched thermocouple data.
• The photoperiod detector demonstrated accuracy comparable to time-lapse photography.
• The sensor accurately detected budburst timing without influencing it in Populus clones.

Conclusions:

• The developed sensor reliably measures budburst timing and environmental drivers in natural settings.
• This technology can facilitate landscape-level plant phenotyping for integration with landscape genomics.
• Enables better understanding of plant adaptation to climate change through in situ studies.