This paper proposes a medium access control (MAC) mechanism for the recently developed IEEE 802.15.4 standard, a promising candidate to become the physical (PHY) and MAC layer standard for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). The main concern in WSNs is the energy consumption, and this paper presents a mechanism that adapts properly the duty cycle operation according to the traffic conditions. Various traffic adaption mechanisms have been presented for the MAC layer of the IEEE 802.15.4. However these conventional mechanisms only consider the temporal traffic fluctuations. The proposed mechanism outperforms the conventional mechanism when applied to cluster-tree based WSNs, because it considers not only the temporal fluctuations but also the spatial (geographical) fluctuations, which are intrinsic characteristics of traffic in WSNs with the cluster tree topology. Evaluations showed that the proposed mechanism achieves less energy consumption than the conventional traffic adaptation mechanism, with maintaining almost the same transmission performance.