New Tweeting Tree Is Climate Change Storyteller

This month, Harvard Forest launched the first tweeting tree in North America. 

The project has been years in the making. The 100-year-old red oak tree first came into the spotlight in 2017, as the focal point for the climate change book Witness Tree, written by visiting Bullard Fellow Lynda Mapes. In 2018, post-doctoral fellow Tim Rademacher (from Northern Arizona University and Harvard Forest) installed sensors in and around the tree, hoping to continue Mapes' storytelling mission through data-driven stories on social media. 

In 2018, students began contributing to the social media project: Kyle Wyche and Shawna Greyeyes from the Harvard Forest Summer Research Program and Alexa Rice from the Harvard Divinity School joined Rademacher and HF Outreach Director Clarisse Hart to write program code and formulate multimedia messages that would allow the tree to tweet about its growth, sap flow, and changing environment in real time.

Since its launch on Twitter in July 2019, the Harvard Forest Witness Tree has become a sensation, engaging thousands of followers from around the world.

Future plans for the project include a Facebook account for the tree, French and Spanish versions of the project, and a tool-kit for educators to create their own tweeting trees.

Funding for the project is provided in part by the National Science Foundation.

• Visit the Witness Tree on Twitter.
• Learn more about the project.
• Explore news about the project: 

• Boston Globe (August 2019): Self-Tweeting Tree is Harvard's Newest Climate Change Educator
• TV: Worcester News Tonight (August 2019): Witness Tree Tweets
• NPR's All Things Considered (August 2019): This Red Oak Tree Has Its Own Twitter and It Shares Insight About Climate Change
• Weather.com (August 2019): Tweeting Tree Bears Witness to Climate Change
• Harvard Gazette (August 2019): A Red Oak Live Tweets Climate Change
• Mental Floss (July 2019): A Massachusetts Tree Is Live-Tweeting Its Perspective on Climate Change
• Atlas Obscura (July 2019): The Tree That Is Live-Tweeting Climate Change