Care to See Your Plants to Dance? They Do (2024)

Imagine putting on a pair of headphones and being able to determine the health of plants across the globe based purely on what you hear. You’d be able to make remote adjustments to soil, water, or fertilizer based on what you heard, ensuring healthy plants. That’s exactly what scientists at Virginia Tech’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences’ School of Plant and Environmental Sciences are researching.

Associate Professor Bingyu Zhao and his team are studying the microscopic movements and sounds plants grown in a hydroponic environment make based on the nutrients they have – or lack – from water.

Plants move during the day and as they grow, creating their own movement patterns. That dance creates a sound that changes based on a variety of environmental factors, including sun, soil quality, and nutrients.

“Plants that are in a healthy condition have a specific movement pattern,” Zhao said. “When a plant is stressed, such as lacking nutrients, the pH of the water dramatically changes, or lacking light, the movement pattern changes. We want to understand the plant movement pattern or use the plant movement pattern to reflect plant health.”

Using peppers grown in this environment as the test subjects, Zhao and his team are using the high-resolution cameras to capture movement and convert it to sound, so that it can be studied, interpreted, and used to provide targeted stimuli back to the plants.

Machine learning can analyze these sounds and the raw video footage to correlate health with sound. By just listening to the plant movement pattern, you can understand if the plants are in a healthy condition or in a stressed condition.

Continue reading at VTnews.vt.edu.

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