Open-System chamber for measurements of gas exchanges at plant level

Gas exchanges of whole canopy can be studied by covering entire plants with a chamber and using portable infrared gas analyzers (IRGAs) to measure CO2 and H2O exchanged with the air blown through the chamber enclosure. The control of temperature rise inside the chamber, which should be kept low, and the accurate measurement of the air flow are two crucial aspects for realistic and precise estimation of photosynthesis and transpiration. An automated open-system plant chamber (clear flexible balloon enclosure) for small plants was developed to ameliorate such a technique. The temperature rise is here predicted by heat balance analysis inside the chamber. The analysis shows that when as much as 500 W m2 of solar radiation is converted to sensible heat, a flow rate of 0.98 mol s-1 (!20 L s-1) of air blown into a cylindershaped enclosure (0.8 m high, 0.5 m wide) is adequate to limit temperature increase to 2 K. An improved calibration for the measurement of the chamber airflow was obtained by combining the use of a Pitot tube anemometer with the classical CO2 injection approach. The concentration increase due to the injection of CO2 at a known rate into the chamber was predicted by the air flow calculated from the "Pitot" air velocity. The turbulent regime of air assured that a single-point Pitot measurement was enough for a good estimation (slope ) 0.99; R2) 0.999) of the actual air flow. The open-system chamber was tested on potted sunflower (Helianthus annuus, L.) and maize (Zea mays, L.) plants under variable solar radiation, temperature, and air humidity during the daytime. As expected, similar rates of maximal leaf-area based photosynthesis (about 40 ?mol m-2 s-1) were observed in the two species confirming the reliability of our system. The consistency of data also resulted from the typical relationships observed between photosynthetic rate and light.