Ask the Witness Trees! A new paper by the Trinity College Botanic Garden team just published in Plants, People, Planet asks how botanic gardens can utilise their vast living collections of plants to gather vital information about environmental change. The paper explains that “…botanic gardens are ideal settings for long-term studies on plant responses to climate change…” and goes on to describe the establishment of the long-term monitoring study at the Garden, the Witness Tree Project, which is now in its fourth year.
Through active research using their living collections, botanic gardens around the world can adopt the idea for similar local studies and demonstrate to their visitors the important and dynamic role of plants in witnessing, recording and teaching us more about the atmosphere that surrounds us.
Lead author on the paper Midori Yajima is a former intern of Trinity College Botanic Garden and currently a PhD Candidate in the Discipline of Botany at Trinity College Dublin. You can read the open access paper by Yajima et al. (2025) here.
