If Plants Could Talk, What Would They Tell Us About the Environment?

Although we may often forget it, plants are an essential part of human life. They provide us with food, both directly and indirectly. Humans alone devour over 7,000 species of plants, with cereals such as wheat, maize and rice and crops such as potatoes and legumes an essential part our diets.

Plants regulate the air we breathe. Our oxygen is a by-product of photosynthesis, and plants absorb the Co2 we create by burning fossil fuels. Although, recent research, published in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions, focused on the impact of global air, predicting that future ozone levels could be high enough to cause serious damage to plants and crops, even if emissions of greenhouse gases are reduced. To read more about this topic, take a look at: Future Air Quality Could Put Plants and People at Risk.

Our conventional medicines such as morphine, aspirin and quinine are derived from plants, and Fungi have also revolutionised medicine, with examples including antibiotics such as penicillin and immunosuppressant and cholesterol drugs.

With plants playing such a major role in our everyday lives, it’s unsurprising that they are still a source of much fascinating research for scientists worldwide. Most recently, a team of European researchers have been pushing the boundaries of plant research in order to establish what plants talk about and what they can tell us about the environment.

Are plants PLEASED to meet you?

A network of microsensors that can be embedded in plants to send information about plants’ response to environmental changes such as humidity, temperature, pollution and exposure to chemicals, are being developed by British, Spanish and Italian researchers. These microsensors will allow researchers to analyse signals transmitted by plants and draw conclusions about what the plant is communicating about its environment. The project,Plants Employed As Sensing Devices (PLEASED), has raised EU funding of over a million euros to date.

Speaking about the project, researcher Stefano Mancuso said, "A digital network and a powerful algorithm transforms each tree into an environmental informer. A single tree will be able to give information about several environmental parameters simultaneously. But using traditional sensors, as is currently the case in environmental monitoring stations, means using one sensor for each parameter, which is very expensive.” 

The fact that plants have a means of communicating with each other is not a recent discovery, and this project is not the first of its kind. Others, such as the PLANTOID project, have combined plants and technology by creating ‘robots’ that imitate plant behaviour to gather information by soil monitoring and exploration.

However, a major advantage of the project is the accessible and low-cost technology used, and that the data collected will be readily available on a global scale. This means that anyone interested in the project can make sensors to use on their own plants, contribute their own findings to a database and get access to researchers’ findings, whether they want to research the effects of changing temperatures or of certain chemicals on their plants.