Wednesday, November 7, 2007 - 3:15 PM
239-14
The Georgia Envirotron: A Multidisciplinary Controlled Environment Facility.
Gerrit Hoogenboom1, Ian Flitcroft1, Axel Garcia y Garcia1, and Keith T. Ingram2. (1) Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering, University of Georgia, Griffin, GA 30223-1797, (2) University of Florida, 239 Rogers Hall, P. O. Box 110570, Gainesville, FL 32611-0570
The Georgia Envirotron is a controlled environment facility that facilitates and promotes multidisciplinary research on stresses in agricultural and environmental systems. The Georgia Environmental Technology Consortium (GETC) of the Georgia Research Alliance (GRA ) provided funding for the Georgia Envirotron in 1994. The overall design, development, and construction took four years and the Georgia Envirotron was completed in 1998. It consists of four components that give the capacity to operate at different scales: growth chambers for individual plants, greenhouses with the capacity to grow plants in pots or soil, rainout shelters to grow plants in soil, and movable chambers that can extend the research to farmers’ fields. The growth chamber component consists of six 72 square feet and three 36 square feet Conviron walkin growth chambers with high intensity lighting and temperature, humidity, and carbon dioxide control. For most studies, the growth chambers are used for multi-factorial experiments where one or more environmental variables are modified. The Envirotron has been used extensively to study the impact of the interaction of temperature and carbon dioxide on growth and development of multiple crops, including soybean, corn, cotton, and peanut. Although the crops are grown in containers, one of the main advantages of these large chambers is that the plants can be harvested during the growing season for intensive growth analysis. Recently the growth chambers were used for continuous monitoring of gas exchange with the PTM-48M for corn and soybean, grown at high temperatures. With the detailed control provided by these growth chambers, especially for environmental conditions that cannot easily be modified under field conditions such as temperature extremes and elevated CO2, the Georgia Envirotron provides a unique opportunity for the evaluation of crop growth simulation models.