Plant language about to be deciphered

A European research program in Florence is trying to break the code of plant language and decipher what trees and flowers think about their surrounding environment.

Leading scientist, Stefano Mancuso, explains how plants communicate: 'We know that plants are able to speak, but we know just few words of their vocabulary. Most of the signals that plants exchanges among them are chemicals volatiles, molecules moving in the air, but we know the meaning of these messages, just for few of these molecules. Mostly they are alarm molecules, but we know excactly that plants are not just able to exchange alarm signals, but they are able also to exchange informations, about the environment, informations about the soil, informations about the social neighboring.'

So what could plants communicate that is so important for scientists to decipher their language? Mancuso explains that: 'Plants are able to sense the gravitational field, electrical fields, chemicals gradients, etc. This huge amount of information, exchanged by plants is there, why shouldn’t we use it?'

In other words, a single tree can tell us everything about its environment, from real-time monitoring of ozone, to measuring chemicals in agriculture, decoding the language of plants could give us a global picture of the health of our environment, in a way not possible before.

The method used to decipher plant language is through sensors that register electrical signals emitted by plants and then transform those signal into digital data via a powerful algorithm.

However, each sensor monitors a single environment parameter and that means that a large amount of sensors need to be used for a complete plant language analysis. This detail makes the project very expensive as plants can send even thousands of messages, each requiring a different sensor to record and analyze.