In the not too distant future, we could see cyborg plants that tell us when they need more water, what chemicals theyve been exposed to, and what parasites are eating their roots. These part-organic, part-electronic creations may even tell us how much pollution is in the air. And yes, theyll plug into the network.

Thats right: Were on our way to the Internet of Plants.

Thats the message from Andrea Vitaletti, the head of a blue-sky research group working on this very thing at a lab in Italy. The project is called PLEASED, short for PLants Employed As SEnsing Devices. Though the project is still in the early stages, Vitaletti believes plants could serve as ideal sensors, monitoring so many aspects of our environment. Plants are cheap and resilient, he argues, and they could potentially monitor many different things simultaneously.

Plants have millions of years of evolution. They are robust. They want to survive, Vitaletti says.

Andrea Vitaletti

His interest in combining plants and electronics dates to childhood, when he and his father used schematics found in an electronics magazine to build a simple circuit for generating sound from plants. He went on to pursue computer engineering at the University of Rome, where he studied algorithms for wireless networks and sensors. But the Internet of Plants idea didnt take root until he saw TED talk on plant intelligence.

Vitaletti soon called the author of the talk, University of Florence professor Stefano Mancuso, and the possibility of using plants as sensors blossomed. This led to PLEASED, a project that spans many operations, from Vitalettis company W-LAB and hardware company Advanticsys to The University of Southampton in Britain, The University of Florence and the London Institute for Mathematical Sciences. Its funded by the European Commission.

The fundamental notion is plants could be used as low cost, sustainable sensors for monitoring environmental factors like soil quality and air pollution. Vitaletti and other scientists already are working to connect various species with Arduino circuit boards that can record and transmit information. Eventually, these cyborg plants could detect parasites and pollutants in crops, or they could play a role in whats called precision agriculture, telling farmers when they need more water or more nutrients or less. More broadly, they could monitor the effects of acid rain in the environment or the health of city parks.

Yes, we already have a wide variety of sensors for detecting temperature, humidity and the like. And even Vitaletti admits they are more accurate that whats possible from plants today. But he believes plants, with their robust and multi-facted nature, plants eventually could take us beyond the state of the art.

Like the human brain, plants respond to external stimuli from electrical signals. But while we already have tools for monitoring electrical activity in the brain tools even let you control video games and robotic arms with brain waves the mechanisms for plant signaling are less understood.

Read the rest here:

The Internet of Vegetables: How Cyborg Plants Can Monitor Our World