Ecotrons: Powerful and versatile ecosystem analysers for ecology, agronomy and environmental science

Abstract

Accepted Article This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved Ecosystems integrity and services are threatened by anthropogenic global changes. Mitigating and adapting to these changes requires knowledge of ecosystem functioning in the expected novel environments, informed in large part through experimentation and modelling. This paper describes 13 advanced controlled environment facilities for experimental ecosystem studies, herein termed ecotrons, open to the international community. Ecotrons enable simulation of a wide range of natural environmental conditions in replicated and independent experimental units whilst simultaneously measuring various ecosystem processes. This capacity to realistically control ecosystem environments is used to emulate a variety of climatic scenarios and soil conditions, in natural sunlight or through broad spectrum lighting. The use of large ecosystem samples, intact or reconstructed, minimises border effects and increases biological and physical complexity. Measurements of concentrations of greenhouse trace gases as well as their net exchange between the ecosystem and the atmosphere are performed in most ecotrons, often quasi continuously. The flow of matter is often tracked with the use of stable isotope tracers of carbon and other elements. Equipment is available for measurements of soil water status as well as root and canopy growth. The experiments run so far emphasize the diversity of the hosted research. Half of them concern global changes, often with a manipulation of more than one driver. About a quarter deal with the impact of biodiversity loss on ecosystem functioning and one quarter with ecosystem or plant physiology. We discuss how the methodology for environmental simulation and process measurements, especially in soil, can be improved and stress the need to establish stronger links with modelling in future projects. These developments will enable further improvements in mechanistic understanding and predictive capacity of ecotron research which will play, in complementarity with field experimentation and monitoring, a crucial role in exploring the ecosystem consequences of environmental changes.

Competitive trait hierarchies of native communities and invasive propagule pressure consistently predict invasion success during grassland establishment

“…To test for the effect of community type in combination with heat and flood pulses, an experiment was conducted in two walk-in climate chambers (2.4 9 3.2 9 2.2 m 3 ; area 7.7 m 2 ; Fig. S1.3) at TUMmesa (TUM Model EcoSystem Analyser) at Technical University of Munich (Roy et al 2021). During the experiment, the chambers were maintained at 12 h light and 12 h dark, air temperature was set to 25/15°C (day/night range), and 60-65% relative humidity.…”

Recent developments and potential of robotics in plant eco-phenotyping

“…Mesocosm-level ecological phenotypic studies help to simulate the ecological environment and facilitate microbial community studies, allowing both internal and external biological properties to be measured without penetrating the ground. By studying physiological responses exhibited by plants when the plants were interacting with either conspecific or interspecific neighbors, the ecological footprint of cropping systems provide insight into the development of more eco-friendly cropping strategies [73]. Rhizotrons are one of the earliest non-destructive underground Mesocosm-level platforms.…”

“…Compared with Proximal sensing platforms, commercial drone technology has become more mature. Drone technology in general is a domain of [38,73]. rapid advance, spurring on the development of a decent range of agricultural remote sensing drone products [92,93].…”

The iDiv Ecotron—A flexible research platform for multitrophic biodiversity research

“…The idea behind an ecotron is to combine the precision, specificity, and complete control of single independent and response variables of laboratory experiments and the realism and large-scale community-and environment-related aspects of field studies. Roy et al (2021) define an ecotron as an "… experimental facility comprising a set of replicated enclosures designed to host ecosystems samples, enabling realistic simulation of above-and belowground environmental conditions, while simultaneously and automatically measuring ecosystem processes. Therefore, ecotrons provide continuous information on ecosystem functioning (fluxes of energy and matter)."…”

“…The Silwood Park Ecotron in particular has focused research on multitrophic interactions (see Lawton, 1996;Lawton et al, 1993). The iDiv Ecotron continues the tradition of aboveground-belowground work by creating a facility capable of housing a multitude of above-and belowground organisms from various trophic groups in a large number of single independent chambers (unlike other indoor facilities, such as ExpoSCREEN in Munich, Germany, or the Montpellier Ecotron mesocosms in France; see Roy et al, 2021) while being completely independent from external weather conditions (unlike, for example, the Hasselt Ecotron in Belgium).…”