Plants can talk: a new era in plant acoustics

Abstract

Plants release chemical signals to interact with their environment when exposed to stress. Khait and colleagues unveiled that plants 'verbalize' stress by emitting airborne sounds. These can train machine learning models to identify plant stressors. This unlocks a new path in plant-environment interactions research with multiple possibilities for future applications.

Keywords: airborne sounds; machine learning; plant bioacoustics; plant stress; sound transmission.