I hated everything about this. It took five months. I had to code the tool to make this and don’t even know basic HTML. There was calculus for plants.

Trees oscillate at a particular frequency that fluctuates throughout the year. That’s linked to unknown physiological processes and environmental cues. If we understand why by using accelerometers to measure their displacement, potentially you could hook a bunch of those up to a forest and passively monitor its health. Wildland firefighters could have Cybersen for trees.

This graph measures noise density, which fucks with data collection, on the Y axis and the frequency in hertz on the X. The blue line on top is the accelerometer the team had been using. The bottom red line is the only one I found after dozens of hours of searching non-standardised datasheets which came close to matching it on paper. Since trees oscillate in the sub-1Hz range which is well below what most cheap accelerometers measure, that dip from 0-1 is about a two order of magnitude improvement for the exact frequency range that the PI wanted to investigate.

I thought tree research would involve climbing trees and thinking about them real good. It isn’t. It’s all mathematics and coding and making motherboards. Science isn’t as fun as cartoons said it would be even when you go into the interdisciplinary ones because you know you can’t do mathematics or code.

  • happybadger [he/him]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
    7·
    6 days ago

    I don’t understand the mathematics well enough to explain them, but PSD sounds correct. Those letters are in the code along with FFT, so I know it does those two things but can’t tell you anything more than a monkey with a typewriter could. It’s a 3-axis MEMs accelerometer and I’m drawing the Y-axis data from the Y-axis of those 3D movements in the tree. The accelerometers were screwed midway up the trunks of two straight trees.