Articles
IS LEAF TEMPERATURE A SUITABLE PARAMETER FOR GREENHOUSE ENVIRONMENT CONTROL?
Changes in air velocity, air humidity, irradiation and transpiration may result in leaf temperatures which in greenhouses differ as much as from -6 to +7°C from air temperature.
On the other hand one may expect that plant growth, flower induction or -development is a pronounced function of the tissue temperature rather than of air temperature.
A good theoretical knowledge may give us opportunities to predict variations in leaf temperature as a function of changes in single or few climatic parameters.
But in the greenhouse climatic parameters are changing often, partly due to totally unpredictable changes in the outside climatic conditions.
From this we may conclude that variations in leaf temperature are far beyond all theories.
Nevertheless, all environmental control in greenhouses is based on airconditioning.
At our institute we should like to investigate the possibilities of changing the strategy of climatic control in greenhouses.
Principles, which today are based on airconditioning, towards principled based on plant conditioning.
We are convinced that leaf temperature might be a suitable parameter for this.