“ Studying Dynamic Climatic Impacts

The 30 th anniversary of NCL, the New Zealand controlled environment laboratory, was marked on 20 March 2000. This anniversary opens the fourth decade of service by NCL to researchers in New Zealand and internationally. Looking forward into this decade provides the stimulus for this workshop series, focused on current issues in controlled environment (CE) science. The workshop series is designed to provide a venue to review current CE capability at NCL and abroad and explore applications, requirement, and developments in relation to present and future research directions. Notable issues that provide a background to the workshop series include: S the every-increasing capability and economy of electronic sensing, data acquisition and analytical systems; S use of CE capability to address public concerns about perceived risk associated with field application of genetic technologies to plants S use of CE regimes to enhance understanding of how the root environment contributes to plant performance; S study of ecosystem-process such as plant-to-plant interaction under CE regimes S ready availability of modelling approaches to integrate knowledge of environmental impacts gleaned from a range of CE and field experiments; S the need to enhance the cost-effectiveness of production-oriented plant research S the need to develop and apply methods to transfer quantitatively results achieved under (often) stable CE regimes to the ever-fluctuating natural environment. A subset of these issues (namely, integration, cost-effectiveness, transferability) provide the background to this inaugural workshop focused on how the time-dependence of environmental variation can be used as an experimental variable. The potential to do this is a key feature distinguishing CE facilities from other methods of studying environmental impacts. It is also a use that exploits the full manipulative capability at NCL. Our aim in planning the workshop was to increase awareness of NCL's capabilities in this regard, and at the same time, assist development of CE technical capabilities at NCL towards modes of room operation tailored to study of time-dependent processes. We also wanted to facilitate interaction between researchers who together may find in NCL a convenient and power tool to: • Produce more accurate and precise models for applied decision support systems. • Produce quantitative knowledge of system responses to environmental variation to allow management via novel environmental conditions. • Produce quantitative knowledge of the interaction between environment and gene function The workshop was divided into two sessions. The first surveyed environmental responses with dynamics extending from seconds to months. …