Witness tree social media project: Can we increase science engagement with a twittering tree?

A 100+-year-old Northern Red Oak in a deciduous forest in Massachusetts is wired to use real-time and historical data to post on Twitter and Facebook. Sensors on and near the tree (sap-flow, growth, weather, and phenology) reveal ecologically meaningful events. A bot translates the data into social media posts to communicate to a broad audience about climate, community ecology, seasonal changes, and physiology. The bot tests different approaches to science communication, choosing at random between post types: data-driven and conversational, with or without multimedia. We measure engagement for each post to judge the effectiveness of these different science communication approaches.