# A Red Oak Live Tweets Climate Change August 13, 2019 Tree in Harvard Forest outfitted with sensors, cameras, and other digital equipment sends out on-the-ground coverage [The Harvard Gazette](https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/08/tree-in-harvard-forest-live-tweets-climate-change/) *Nate Herpich, Harvard Correspondent* If a tree could talk, what might it say? Would it plead for rain in a drought? Fawn over a neighbor's foliage? Crack jokes about how fast another tree loses its leaves in fall? It seems unlikely anyone will ever come across a loquacious linden. But for the arbor-curious, a red oak at the Harvard Forest in Petersham has been tweeting as [@awitnesstree](https://twitter.com/awitnesstree) since July 17. Outfitted with sensors and cameras, and programmed with code that allows it to string together posts with prewritten bits of text, [the Harvard Forest Witness Tree](https://harvardforest.fas.harvard.edu/witness-tree-social-media-project#History) has been sharing on-the-ground insights into its own environmental life and that of its forest. Already renowned in certain circles as the subject of the popular climate-change book "[Witness Tree](https://harvardforest.fas.harvard.edu/witness-tree-book)" by Lynda Mapes, the century-old oak's social-media debut was the brainchild of Harvard Forest postdoctoral fellow [Tim Rademacher](https://twitter.com/ttrademacher?lang=en) and is now a team effort with [Clarisse Hart](https://comscicon.com/people/clarisse-hart), who heads outreach and education for the forest. Its online presence is modeled after similar "twittering" trees that chronicle their life experiences as part of a tree-water and carbon-monitoring network based in Europe called [TreeWatch.net](https://treewatch.net/). "We've done the work as a team to equip the tree with a voice, which we decided made the most sense in the first person, and even with a personality, in order to make it relatable to a larger audience," said Rademacher. "But most importantly, our Witness Tree is an objectively data-driven account, which I expect will amplify messages of climate change. But we don't decide what gets posted, the tree does." Read the full article: See also:- [ General ](/news-type/general) - [ Climate Change ](/research-areas/climate) - [ Ecology & Biodiversity ](/research-areas/ecology-and-biodiversity) Share on:- [ Facebook ](#) - [ Twitter ](#) - [ Linkedin ](#)