Wednesday, November 7, 2007 - 11:25 AM
239-6

Controlled Environment Facilities for Plant Process Quantification and Modeling: Advantages and Limitations.

K. Raja Reddy, Box 9555, Mississippi State University, Mississippi State University, Department of Plant. & Soil Sciences, Mississippi State, MS 39762 and Vangimalla Reddy, USDA-ARS, USDA-ARS-NRI-RSMLBARC-WEST, 10300 Baltimore Ave.B-007008, Beltsville, MD 20705-2350.

As we progress in developing systems for understanding plant responses to environment, whether in support of global climate change research or increased application of precision agriculture technologies, the need for diagnostics and management decision aids will become more urgent.  Mechanistic crop models and automated, user-friendly expert systems can facilitate selection of the optimum solutions to problems with many variables. For the models to correctly predict crop responses to environment, the crop and genotype-specific response functions must be realistically assembled. These environment-genotype interactions can be measured and incorporated into a meaningful model.  In this paper, we demonstrate the utility and value of controlled environment facility known as Soil-Plant-Atmosphere-Research (SPAR) in generating such functional relationships to a wide range of environmental conditions for a given crop that encompass its ecological range. To acquire such a data, SPAR is more expedient and economical than field-plot experiments, because SPAR allows the scientist to minimize many of the covarying and confounding factors that occur in field experiments. As a result, basic crop processes can be investigated more directly in response to environmental variable(s) being studied. Also, the SPAR facilities are optimized for the measurement of plant and canopy-level physiological, growth and developmental processes under precisely controlled, but naturally lit, environmental conditions. Here, we will show several examples of research results from SPAR facilities that are crucial for developing process-level crop models and their validity in the real-world production environments. The data obtained in the past and as well as in future studies using controlled environment facilities such as SPAR will be unique and instructive for both basic and applied plant biologists.

Back to Symposium--Past, Present, & Future of Research in Controlled Environments
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Back to The ASA-CSSA-SSSA International Annual Meetings (November 4-8, 2007)