ENVIRATRON - An Accelerator for Climate Change Research

One of the grand scientific challenges of our times is to understand how organisms in the biosphere can adapt to climate change. How does the information encoded in a genome express under different environmental conditions? The ENVIRATRON project is a phenomics platform that enables researchers to monitor the performance of plants throughout their lifespan when subject to a variety of environmental conditions, including anticipated future environments. The ENVIRATRON will permit researchers to incrementally alter critical variables to better simulate changing conditions that we face in the future.  The ENVIRATRON consists of an array of plant growth chambers to create different environmental conditions. Unlike commercial plant phenomics systems, plants are not conveyed out of the growth chambers to monitor their growth performance, rather a rover with a robotically controlled arm will periodically visit each chamber to image and analyze the plants. In addition to more standard RGB, florescence, near IR and IR imaging, sensors on the rover will be capable of imaging and conducting analyses not available on commercial systems such as hyperspectral and holographic imaging and Raman spectroscopy. The robot-assisted sensing approach will enable precise location-specific data acquisition, resulting in improved sampling strategies and data quality.