As of tomorrow there will be a 30-year-old elm tree at Wageningen University that is going to tweet about the weather and its health – a Dutch first. It will have all kinds of devices stuck it to do so, but that’s par for the course.

Is it getting enough water, it is being properly taken care of, that sort of thing. The tweeting is of course for fun and to make the public aware of trees and their environment. The boffins taking measurements will also use the data they plan to collect for climate change purposes.

Belgium already has three tweeting trees: an oak, a maple and a beech tree, while in Germany there’s a whole ‘forest’ of them. Spain and Switzerland will have some trees on Twitter in the near future as well.

(Link: nos.nl, Photo of Elm tree by Sludge G, some rights reserved)