Living Lab @ Campus
Our campus serves as a living laboratory, where research, infrastructure, and daily activities come together to advance sustainability in practice. By testing innovative solutions in real-world conditions the campus becomes a platform for experimentation, learning, and impact. This approach allows researchers, students, and staff to collaborate across disciplines, generate data-driven insights, and translate scientific knowledge into scalable solutions that benefit both the institution and society at large.
This project, led by Prof. Avi Levy, from the Department of Plant and Environmental Sciences, explores innovative approaches to sustainable agriculture in response to the growing environmental crisis and its impact on food security. By focusing on advanced plant-growth systems such as vertical farming and agrivoltaics, the research aims to reduce land, water, energy, and chemical inputs while enabling food production in urban and energy-generating environments.
As part of the Institute’s campus-as-a-living-laboratory approach, crops are grown under the campus’s photovoltaic panels, allowing researchers to study plant performance in real-world agrivoltaic conditions. The research seeks to develop crops that can thrive under low-light environments, one of the main limitations of both systems, using two complementary strategies: screening tomato biodiversity to identify genes associated with low-light growth, and applying targeted gene editing to improve plant performance. While vertical farming has so far been limited mainly to leafy greens, this work focuses on tomato, with the expectation that the genes identified will be conserved across many crops, enabling broader application to future sustainable food systems.
For more information about the project please visit this link.
On the left: Dr. Noa Glanz-Idan (Levy lab) on the roof of the parking building with tomato plants under the photovoltaic panel.
The Weizmann Tree Lab, led by Prof. Tamir Klein, has developed a novel method to measure tree carbon uptake and provide data online accurately and continuously. Sensors are installed directly on select trees to monitor carbon uptake continuously. To calibrate this method, branch tips are sampled from the trees once a month for carbon isotope composition. The group is working on upscaling of tree carbon intake to forest carbon sequestration, which will be informed by forestry inventory data and could be further improved by tree counting using aerial or high-resolution satellite imaging. The method has been validated against two other research techniques at lower (leaf) and higher (forest canopy) scales, and has been applied to several tree species at a number of sites in Israel.
The team working on this technology at the Weizmann Tree Lab consists of highly skilled staff scientists, postdoctoral fellows, and PhD students, all trained in tree and carbon research and using the most cutting-edge tools in tree carbon uptake research, including carbon isotope analyzers, infra-red gas analyzers, and advanced computation tools.
The team has recently conducted a proof-of-concept application on 100 trees across 14 species at the Weizmann campus gardens. Since August 2023, they have been continuously monitoring tree carbon uptake in these trees through sensors directly placed on the trees, resulting in a wealth of knowledge and new information. Specifically, they can show how much carbon the trees in one species uptake concurrently, as well as in the past; which species and individual trees outperform others, and which lag behind; and the calculation of the total tree carbon intake of the entire campus gardens.
For more information about this project please visit this link.
The Weizmann Institute of Science campus is a unique space where advanced scientific research takes place alongside rich and diverse nature, forming a living laboratory for learning and environmental education. A nature survey serves as a practical meeting point between science, education, and sustainability. Through systematic documentation of biodiversity, plants, animals, and fungi,up-to-date scientific knowledge about the local environment is collected over time and across defined spaces, providing a foundation for understanding ecological processes and for making responsible environmental management decisions.
Alongside the ecological nature survey conducted by professional surveyors from the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel, an ongoing citizen science project is taking place in partnership between the Weizmann Institute of Science and the Davidson Institute of Science Education. This project invites students, faculty, staff, and visitors to take an active role data collection using the iNaturalist.org app. In this way, observing nature becomes a research- and education-driven activity that promotes sustainability, strengthens the connection between the campus and its community, and supports the conservation of local biodiversity.
Participants document observations with photographs, receive identification support through AI and a community of experts, and contribute precise time- and location-based data to an open knowledge database. Together, these contributions build a living, continuously updated picture of the campus’s biodiversity - serving as a source of local pride, scientific research, and a deeper connection between people, science, and nature.
The campus observation survey is open for viewing and participation through the dedicated iNaturalist project:
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/observations-at-the-weizmann-institute-of-science