Evaluation of RFID Tags to Permanently Mark Trees in Natural Populations

Long-term ecological and genetic studies in natural populations of tree species require marking techniques so that individuals can be re-visited over time, even in difficult terrain. Both GPS coordinates and physical labels have disadvantages that can make re-finding trees difficult. We tested passi...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inFrontiers in plant science Vol. 7; p. 1342
Main Authors Marczewski, Tobias, Ma, Yongpeng, Sun, Weibang
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Switzerland Frontiers Media S.A 31.08.2016
Subjects
Long-range detection
marking
Plant Science
RFID
tagging
Tree
Tree population
tree
tagging
RFID
marking
long-range detection
tree population
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Summary:Long-term ecological and genetic studies in natural populations of tree species require marking techniques so that individuals can be re-visited over time, even in difficult terrain. Both GPS coordinates and physical labels have disadvantages that can make re-finding trees difficult. We tested passive and semi-active radio frequency identification (RFID) tags and readers as a means to relocate individual trees. Passive RFID tags do not provide a good solution because of low transmission power of hand-held readers and strong directionality. Semi-active RFID tags provide detection over longer distances, but also suffer from strong directionality. Active RFID tags promise an improvement over semi-passive tags, and could be evaluated in a future study. We conclude that RFID technology has the potential to improve the ability of researchers to locate individual trees repeatedly under natural conditions, and can be used in conjunction with other marking techniques such as physical tags and GPS coordinates.
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This article was submitted to Evolutionary and Population Genetics, a section of the journal Frontiers in Plant Science
Edited by: Badri Padhukasahasram, Illumina, USA
Reviewed by: John Malone, National Institutes of Health, USA; Matthew B. Hamilton, Georgetown University, USA
These authors have contributed equally to this work.
ISSN:1664-462X
1664-462X
DOI:10.3389/fpls.2016.01342