UKCEH Glasshouses Facility (Edinburgh)

The purpose of the UKCEH Glasshouses Facility is to enable controlled experimental studies primarily of plants but also of freshwater and soil biota, and pathogens. The environment plays a major role in the way organisms grow and interact. Controlled environment facilities allow observation of organisms under conditions that can be maintained or varied in a consistent way to allow exploration of the relationship between environment and the organism. The scale of the glasshouse facility allows large numbers of plants (e.g. >3000 pine seedlings in recent work) to be studied simultaneously under the same conditions, allowing study of, among other things, genetic variation in plant growth, disease tolerance, response to stress, timing.