Duke University. Dept. of Botany.

The Phytotron is a controlled environment facility located on the Duke University campus. It houses 48 plant growth chambers and six controlled greenhouses -- a total of over 450 square meters of growth space -- and associated instrumentation and laboratories. Established in 1968 with funds from Duke and the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Phytotron was designed by leading scientists in controlled environment (CE) research and technology.

Controlled environment facilities permit investigators to create experimental systems in which biotic and/or abiotic variables and factors are controlled by the investigator. The phytotron can reproduce different types of environments, ranging from the arctic to the desert to the tropics. Researchers are able to maintain precise control over environmental conditions (e.g., soil type, air temperature, light levels, carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration, relative humidity, nutrients) and the organisms under study (e.g., mixtures of plant and animal species and their spatial arrangement). This provides the opportunity to gain increased understanding of the complex interactions between plants and their environment in studies of global change.

...