In the not too distant future, we could see cyborg plants that tell us when they need more water, what chemicals they’ve been exposed to, and what parasites are eating their roots. These part-organic, part-electronic creations may even tell us how much pollution is in the air. And yes, they’ll plug into the network.

That’s right: We’re on our way to the Internet of Plants.

That’s the message from Andrea Vitaletti, the head of a blue-sky research group working on this very thing at a lab in Italy. The project is called PLEASED, short for “PLants Employed As SEnsing Devices.” Though the project is still in the early stages, Vitaletti believes plants could serve as ideal sensors, monitoring so many aspects of our environment. Plants are cheap and resilient, he argues, and they could potentially monitor many different things simultaneously.

“Plants have millions of years of evolution. They are robust. They want to survive,” Vitaletti says.

— Andrea Vitaletti ‘Plants have millions of years of evolution. They are robust. They want to survive’

His interest in combining plants and electronics dates to childhood, when he and his father used schematics found in an electronics magazine to build a simple circuit for generating sound from plants. He went on to pursue computer engineering at the University of Rome, where he studied algorithms for wireless networks and sensors. But the Internet of Plants idea didn’t take root until he saw TED talk on plant intelligence.

Vitaletti soon called the author of the talk, University of Florence professor Stefano Mancuso, and the possibility of using plants as sensors blossomed. This led to PLEASED, a project that spans many operations, from Vitaletti’s company W-LAB and hardware company Advanticsys to The University of Southampton in Britain, The University of Florence and the London Institute for Mathematical Sciences. It’s funded by the European Commission.

The fundamental notion is plants could be used as low cost, sustainable sensors for monitoring environmental factors like soil quality and air pollution. Vitaletti and other scientists already are working to connect various species with Arduino circuit boards that can record and transmit information. Eventually, these cyborg plants could detect parasites and pollutants in crops, or they could play a role in what’s called precision agriculture, telling farmers when they need more water or more nutrients — or less. More broadly, they could monitor the effects of acid rain in the environment or the health of city parks.

Yes, we already have a wide variety of sensors for detecting temperature, humidity and the like. And even Vitaletti admits they are more accurate that what’s possible from plants today. But he believes plants, with their robust and multi-facted nature, plants eventually could take us beyond the state of the art.

Like the human brain, plants respond to external stimuli from electrical signals. But while we already have tools for monitoring electrical activity in the brain — tools even let you control video games and robotic arms with brain waves — the mechanisms for plant signaling are less understood.

“There’s evidence that plants react to damages, parasites, pollutants, chemicals, acids, and high temperature,” Vitaletti says. “But what’s not known is whether it’s possible to look into the signal and see what generated the event.”

Just like the human brain, plants respond to external stimuli from electrical signals

PLEASED monitors for electrical signals within plants using cheap open source Arduino circuit boards, some custom built hardware, and the same type electrodes used in electromyography — the process of collecting electrical signals from skeletal muscles. “From a technical point of view, there is not much difference between the hardware to collect human biosignals,” Vitaletti says. The hard part is analyzing and interpreting the signals.

“In some ways, this is easier than doing research on humans, because the signals are simpler,” he says. But in other ways it’s more difficult: It’s harder to give and receive feedback from a plant. You can ask a human to think about the color red, for example, but you can’t ask a plant to think about a bug landing on its leaves.

Despite these difficulties, Vitaletti says, the team has made some progress toward understanding at least a few signals, and they’ve released an open data set of their findings so that hobbyists or other scientists can examine their research. But they still have so much work ahead of them. Vitaletti estimates that practical applications are still four or five years out.

In the meantime, his work on PLEASED has borne other fruit. It has also spawned a project that seeks to generate sound from plants. The vegetable class is far more talented than you think.