Continuous water stress monitoring for trees
Get an alert when young plantings or old, valuable trees are suffering in the heat
Let the tree itself tell you when it needs water. Our software recognises water stress automatically and sends you a signal as a tree care professional or fruit grower. That way you act at the moment when intervening still pays off.
The challenge: for up to two weeks, a tree under water stress shows you nothing
Trees in the city rarely have it easy. Paving, limited rootable soil volume, heat trapped between the façades, and a dry spring more and more often. At the same time the trees in your care are geographically spread out: the kilometres add up and time flies by in traffic jams.
The tricky part: a tree only shows water stress once it is already too late. A visual inspection can give no warning signal at all for up to two weeks, while the tree is suffering. The condition of the tree declines. More importantly, this year's shortfall in growth mortgages its vitality for the next 10 years.
The abruptness with which the weather is changing means trees cannot adapt quickly enough.
- Too little water → the young roots in the root ball die off, in exactly the year the tree needs to establish.
- Too much or careless watering → wasted trips, wet feet and no evidence at all of what was given when.
- Noticed too late → a weakened tree attracts pests and diseases, and by then recovery is no longer an option.
And every wrong decision costs twice: once for replacement and replanting, and once for the decades of tree value and cooling you have to build up again from scratch.
The situation you want: the tree signals for itself when you really need to act
What if you could "hear" your trees before the first visible stress? Watering then turns from guesswork into an informed decision — and your round turns from "calling in everywhere" into "going straight to where it is needed".
Managers who monitor their trees continuously are already achieving:
- A higher survival rate for new plantings, because the root ball never dries out unnoticed.
- Targeted watering instead of a fixed watering schedule, with fewer trips and less wasted water.
- Valuable trees that survive construction works, because you see deviations while adjusting still pays off.
- An objective record, that you can put before your client, the green space department or your insurer.
The difference is not more work, but better information.
Measuring the tree's environment
- Rainfall
- Sun
- Air humidity
- Soil moisture in the root zone
- Watering
Listening to the tree itself?
How it works for our customers
A precision dendrometer measures micro-changes in the trunk diameter — movements you would never see with the naked eye. During the day the trunk shrinks through transpiration, at night it recovers. That rhythm tells you two things:
Water stress, before the symptoms
If the trunk no longer recovers at night, the tree is thirsty — often days before the crown shows anything. No lab, no estimates. Simply what the tree is doing right now, followed wirelessly across all your locations. The algorithm compares every tree with its own normal pattern and sends an alert as soon as it deviates from it.
Condition and growth, season after season
The growth curve shows whether a tree is establishing, stalling or recovering. That way you objectively see whether a site improvement works, what a construction site or dewatering does to the tree, and whether an intervention had the expected effect.
Every season you record builds up a reference against which you can measure the next summer.
What it brings you
For young plantings (years 1 to 3)
The aftercare phase is the most critical and the most underestimated phase in the tree chain. A root ball that dries out unnoticed during one dry spring costs you the entire planting.
- An alert before the roots die off instead of a fixed watering schedule.
- Registration per tree — who, when, how much — so that the green space department and the contractor work from the same logbook.
- Demonstrable aftercare at the handover of the guarantee period.
For old, valuable trees
With a monumental tree there is no second chance. What you need is an early signal and a record that holds up.
- Monitoring during works — construction site, dewatering, root damage — with a measurement series from before, during and after.
- Substantiation of interventions and investment decisions with data instead of with an estimate.
- Condition objectively monitored, usable in a tree value assessment following the uniform method (VVOG).
Not an experiment, but everyday practice
PlantData.Live gives you an exact picture of the water stress in your reference trees.
Our algorithm is based on scientifically grounded practice and on what goes wrong in the field without monitoring.
"A sports watch measures your personal condition at any moment of the day. It is no different for trees. And PlantData.Live lets me measure the condition of the trees in my care continuously, remotely."
See the data from Zeveneken online for yourself
Zeveneken is a village where seven historic oaks have been replanted. Zeveneken is part of the municipality of Lochristi in Flanders. Good care for a successful planting goes hand in hand here with digital technology.
Create a free account via this link and get instant access to this monitoring project on our platform.
What do we deliver?
The PlantData.Live solution consists of hardware and software.
By hardware we mean the sensors and components that get the data into our platform: the precision dendrometer on the trunk and, where useful, soil moisture and weather sensors. We work with LoRa and NB-IoT, so that a tree measures even without wifi or a power connection. If you already have sensors, it is worth reading those into our platform as well.
Software is our platform, where you see the condition of all your trees at a glance, set alerts and record the watering. You can explore it via this link.
Ready to know in time that a tree needs you?
Request a quote or a demo without obligation. Together we will look at which trees in your care deserve a measuring point.
Request your quote or demo or call +32 (0)53 36 30 21