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Abstract
Long-term ecological and genetic studies in natural populations of tree species require marking techniques so that individuals can be re-visited over time, even in difficult terrain. Both GPS coordinates and physical labels have disadvantages that can make re-finding trees difficult. We tested passive and semi-active radio frequency identification (RFID) tags and readers as a means to relocate individual trees. Passive RFID tags do not provide a good solution because of low transmission power of hand-held readers and strong directionality. Semi-active RFID tags provide detection over longer distances, but also suffer from strong directionality. Active RFID tags promise an improvement over semi-passive tags, and could be evaluated in a future study. We conclude that RFID technology has the potential to improve the ability of researchers to locate individual trees repeatedly under natural conditions, and can be used in conjunction with other marking techniques such as physical tags and GPS coordinates.
Highlights
Studies concerned with tree species growing in natural populations are carried out in several fields of biology, including different branches of ecology as well as genetics
Passive radio frequency identification (RFID) tags seemed a good choice for marking as they are not restricted by battery life and are considerably cheaper in comparison to active tags
Due to achieved distances and directionality problems they are not suitable. This is unlikely to improve in the future, as the only means to provide longer detection distances are larger tags not useful for smaller trees, or readers that provide higher output power, which is restricted for field-suitable hand-held readers
Summary
Studies concerned with tree species growing in natural populations are carried out in several fields of biology, including different branches of ecology as well as genetics. Depending on the nature of the study it will be desirable to sub-sample a forest community, which is generally done by establishing plots in selected areas and marking each individual with a persistent, unique, label (Condit, 1998). In such a setting the grid structure of the plot can provide the means to relocate individual trees, especially when an adequate labeling scheme is used, that incorporates the layout of the grid (Condit, 1998). For example only a single species is of interest, it might be important to include many individuals of this species, rather covering a large area than restricting the sampling to a plot, especially if the population density is low
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