Ambassador Trees: Prototypes Toward AI-Mediated Ecosystem Translation

Abstract This paper presents Ambassador Trees, a biodesign research project that explores how plant sensing, environmental monitoring, and artificial intelligence can be reconfigured to support new forms of human-nature communication. Rather than treating plants and ecosystems as passive objects of measurement or optimization, the project reframes trees as localized ecological representatives whose physiological and environmental signals can be translated into interpretable, dialogic forms. Drawing on recent advances in plant sensors, environmental sensing networks, and Artificial Intelligence, this paper synthesizes existing technical research through a non-human-centered and speculative design lens. The work grounds this framework in a series of exploratory physical prototypes, Treeborgs , that embody ideas of interspecies interaction, distributed sensing, and AI-mediated interpretation. Together, these contributions demonstrate how sensing and AI might function not as extractive instruments, but as interpretive media that foster attentiveness, empathy, and ecological responsibility, offering a pathway toward more relational technological engagements with the living world.