New Zealand Forest Research Institute Limited Smart Ideas funded projects

Forests are hosting significant biodiversity, they are key to climate change mitigation and play an important role in NZ’s economy.

Traditionally the forest management sector perceives large forestry blocks as uniform entities. Remote sensing uses a new generation of tools (satellites and drones) to monitor forests ecosystem global fluctuations. While very powerful, these techniques can be expensive to implement, require a large dataset to be analysed and often need ground-truthing validation. Precision forestry is an emerging branch of forest management aimed at enhancing the potential of forests and future-proofing their resilience to climate change. To implement this practice new devices able to continuously monitor the physiological processes of individual trees in real-time need to be developed.

This work aims at adapting and creating low-cost, implantable bioelectronics sensors able to holistically measure tree’s nutritional status, vitality and microbiome fitness. This will be achieved by measuring the concentrations of potassium cations in xylem, sucrose in phloem and under-bark methane. For this, we will use organic electrochemical transistor (OECT) sensor technology. To allow the rapid transfer of information the generated data will be transmitted via a wireless network meshed with Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

The data fusion between remote sensing and physiological sensors will allow foresters, and forest managers to quickly implement best management practices. The wealth of data will empower scientists to decipher fundamental aspects of tree biology and use these tools to select the cultivars best suited for future climate change. The implementation of sensors in forests will be also used as an early diagnosis system again pathogens.

We also believe that this technology will create opportunities for engaging citizens and forest managers in this new generation of forest monitoring.

Replicating the microenvironment that cells experience in a natural organism (in vivo) is extremely challenging in the laboratory (in vitro), yet it is the key to successful tissue culture. Tissue culture (TC) is critical in many disciplines of research, commercial applications and bio-based industries, and therefore improvement of this technique can have a large impact in these sectors. In an intact organism, cells experience complex interactions between cell populations and responses to external signals associated with the variable physical structure as well as a multitude of gradients of different phytohormones and nutrients. To further improve success rates of cell regeneration using TC would require a microenvironment with gradients of stiffness, nutrients and hormones embedded, and 3D tissue structures (scaffolds) in the confined environment to better mimic natural tissue conditions. Over the past few decades, various technologies have been developed to replicate such microenvironment for TC. However, they lack the ability to create an optimised microenvironment for a particular cell type and its developmental stages, especially for recalcitrant species. We propose to develop the technology to produce such a system using an adopted multi-vat 3D printer and test it in the context of in vitro plant regeneration via somatic embryogenesis (SE), which is currently being developed to produce trees for the NZ forestry industry.