Grow Chamber

Motivation to the study

Observing plants is fundamental in modern eco-physiology as a basic starting point for biometry which can be used to model plant. Former development stages can be observed easily in small chambers. This project has been developed to understand how to observe plant development and growth during early stages in controlled environment. Trials have been carried out during winter 2005-2006.

Technology

The chamber is an open shelf with a controlled luminosity which have been given a day-light alternance. Camera operation exposure were optimised. Species selected were faseolum and eliantum. Temperature were monitored and irrigation driven. Long-interval snapshots were taken by automating wake-up and shut-down of a PC were a specific program has been developed to collect images. Successively the collection images have been scaled 40%, have color depth reduced from 32 to 8, ditheried by web-safe pallette, appended to a GIF98a animated file

Movies

Problems Emerged

Main problems partially solved dealt with setting long time snapshots and having the system (PC+ software) working for many day. Further, the scale of grow chamber condition the observation time. Several viewpoint of the plant are also to be investigated.