In-Vivo Vibroacoustic Surveillance of Trees in the Context of the IoT.

Ilyas Potamitis,Nicolaos-Alexandros Tatlas,Stelios Potirakis,Iraklis Rigakis

doi:10.3390/s19061366

Ilyas Potamitis, Nicolaos-Alexandros Tatlas + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/s19061366

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Abstract

This work introduces a device for long term systematic monitoring of trees against borers. A widely applied way to detect wood-boring insects is to insert a piezoelectric probe with an uncoated waveguide in the tree trunk and listen for locomotion or feeding sounds through headphones. This approach has several shortcomings: (a) frequent manual inspection of trees is costly and impractical to scale to hundreds or thousands of trees, (b) the larvae could be present but inactive during the inspection time and, (c) when the trees are in urban environments the background noise can be significant and can mask the feeble sounds of wood-boring insects even with the use of specialized headphones. We introduce a remotely controlled device that records and wirelessly transmits on a scheduled basis short recordings of the internal vibrations of a tree to a server. The user can listen remotely or process the recording automatically to infer the infestation state of the tree with wood-boring insects that feed or move inside the tree. When integrated within the IoT framework this device can scale up to automatically monitoring the trees of the entire city. The proposed approach led to detection results in field trials of the pests Xylotrechus chinensis (Chevrolat) (Cerambycidae) and Rhynchophorus ferrugineus Olivier (Coleoptera: Curculionidae).

Highlights

Trees play a vital role in our planet and affect the life cycle of all living creatures
As a meansinside to evaluate performance order to with confirm a positive prediction of anprocess infestation infestation a tree, we need to sliceand the in tree trunks a chainsaw
We presented a very efficient automatic recorder for sensing, registering and wirelessly emitting the acoustic emissions that the larvae produce during eating and feeding inside the trunk of a tree

Summary

Introduction

Trees play a vital role in our planet and affect the life cycle of all living creatures. Manual inspection of commodities by inserting a piezoelectric probe in the tree trunk to listen for potential internal audio activity due to feeding and locomotion (i.e., passive acoustic detection) is a widely accepted method [13,14,15,16] (listen to Recording S1 in the Supplementary Materials). This approach has some distinct benefits, for example it is portable, has lower cost that competitive methods, can be operated with batteries, requires minor training and there are commercial products available [17]. Their frequency is sounds described thethey ‘Materials

Methods’

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Results

Tree Inspections in the Field

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Discussion