07 IN FOCUS ective tree management is a long-term public concern in Hong Kong. Thousands of trees are located across the city’s densely populated urban areas and country parks, including old and valuable trees that are government registered. All are subject to damage caused by rainstorms, typhoons, and diseases, among others, and could pose a risk to people’s safety. To assist the quest for sustainability and protection, Prof. WANG Yu-Hsing, Civil & Environmental Engineering and Data-Enabled Scalable Research Laboratory (DESR Lab), is creating smart and innovative ways to monitor a tree’s tilt and associated stability. A major goal is to provide information about arboreal resilience and tenacity in response to bad weather conditions – anticipated to be increasingly frequent due to climate change. Starting out from a student project using sensing technology on slopes in , Prof. Wang and his team are now designing and making their fourth-generation tree sensor, which will harvest energy from solar panels and uses artificial intelligence (AI) to carry out data analytics. “What we ultimately aim to achieve is to let AI provide a more solid diagnosis for tree health,” Prof. Wang said. “Even if a tree is seemingly unhealthy, our sensor can continue monitoring it in order to allow it to recover instead of removing it at once.” The benefits of such sensors include easing the workload of the city’s hundreds of arborists, who could be trained how to operate the whole sensing system and whose feedback would also help fine-tune the device. With funding secured from the Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust in early , Prof. Wang’s team began work on a sensor that used a low-power, long-range wide area network (LoRaWAN) for transmitting data in real time and at the same time would be energy-efficient. Big data analytics and timely interventions could then be carried out. During this research period, the team devised di erent generations of sensors, eventually managing to quadruple the data transmission range. The researchers’ work then had a considerable boost in terms of data collection in summer when the Hong Kong Observatory forecast the arrival of Typhoon Mangkhut, the strongest typhoon in the city’s history. Ahead of time, the team installed sensors on trees at Tai Tong in Tai Lam Country Park and on some urban trees. Mangkhut le Hong Kong with around , fallen trees but the team gained significant first-hand scientific data to analyze how and why some trees fell. In late , Prof. Wang and the DESR Lab joined HKUST’s Sustainable Smart Campus as a Living Lab initiative, which supports sustainable cross-disciplinary HKUST projects that can be implemented on campus. He and the team are now continuing to develop their cutting-edge tree sensing system, Internet of Tree Things. E Branching out into smart conservation Prof. Wang Yu-Hsing (seventh from left) and team members from his Data-Enabled Scalable Research Laboratory. Tree sensors installed on Peltophorum tonkinense at the HKUST campus to monitor tilt and stability (main picture), and (above) a close-up of the technology.
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