Weather station set up at the Cursdorf experimental area

Scientists of the Group for Quality Assurance and Industrial Image Processing at the TU, together with a representative of the Thüringen Forst, have equipped the test area of the WIR! alliance Holz-21-Regio in Cursdorf with new trees. They then installed a weather station to monitor the climatic conditions on the trial plot.

With a view to climate change, Dr. Maik Rosenberger is convinced that there is a lot to be done, especially as far as forest conversion is concerned: in particular, weather extremes such as months of drought followed by thunderstorms and heavy rainfall are on the increase: "Since forestry is very dependent on the climate, it is important to adapt forests as well as possible to changing environmental conditions and weather extremes, i.e. to make them climate resilient," explains the graduate engineer. Near-natural mixed forests with a wide variety of structures and predominantly native tree species are therefore best equipped for the future, he says.

As part of the WIR! alliance Holz-21-Regio, he therefore recently planted around 300 new tree seedlings on the initiative's trial site in Cursdorf together with colleagues and Kevin Kögler, a trainee teacher at Erfurt University of Applied Sciences. Within two days, they replaced dead old seedlings and also completely replanted previously unplanted areas. They used various tree species such as chestnut and Douglas fir to test how resistant they are to the changed climatic conditions and whether they are suitable for converting the forest area to greater climate resilience.

The work is part of the Starter Project II Basic Technology Evaluation of the Holz 21 Regio Alliance, one focus of which is climate-resilient forest conversion. The TU Ilmenau is responsible as a cross-industry and cross-sector impulse and idea provider for linking the forestry and timber industry with digitalization and special mechanical engineering. In particular, the developers want to carry out preliminary work for follow-up projects for innovative energy-efficient networked sensors and sensor concepts for forest monitoring in the further course of the project.

The scientists also installed a fully automated weather station at the test site in Cursdorf, which will henceforth transmit current and local weather data on an hourly basis. "We can use this data to gain information about the health and problems of the plants on site," Rosenberger said. The scientists also use the weather data to verify the results of camera analyses they plan to conduct at the trial site at a later date. For this multispectral analysis of the freshly planted seedlings, they already determined a camera location after the planting event, as well as a location for a hut with solar panels to provide electricity. "We have kept another area of the trial plot free for the robotic dog 'Spot', which we plan to test soon on realistic forest terrain for its usability in forest-specific application areas."

The "Holz-21-regio" alliance is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) as part of the "WIR! - Change through Innovation in the Region" funding program.