Minor Spectral Shifts Modulate Morphology, Stomatal Physiology and Nutrient Yield in Culinary Herbs under Controlled Environment Agriculture
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Controlled environment agriculture (CEA) offers an unprecedented opportunity to tune light spectra for intentional enhanced growth and nutrient quality. In a 49-day experiment based on the NASA Growing Beyond Earth program, our hypothesis tested whether a slight increase in the blue and green fractions of light, an unintentional factor attributed to calibration error, would affect morphology, stomatal conductance, and estimated nutritional yield of three widely cultivated and medicated culinary herbs: Genovese Basil (Ocimum basilicum 'Genovese'), Cilantro (Coriandrum sativum 'Cilantro Cruiser'), and Chervil (Anthriscus cerefolium 'Vertissimo'). All plants were grown in five identically controlled environment chambers - four experimental chambers with slightly more blue (≈62.5 PPFD) and green (≈23.5 PPFD) photons and one control with a white light setting (≈121.1 PPFD green; ≈45.8 PPFD blue). Plant height, width, and depth were measured over seven timepoints, and stomatal conductance (gsw) was measured for basil and cilantro (not chervil due to leaf sensitivity to structure). Gsw from leaves was taken as an average between the middle leaf and the two adjacent neighbors. Gsw was tested three times over the period (day 44 around 11:30 AM, day 46 and 49 around 15:30) to measure diurnal gsw patterns. Thus, after winsorisation of extreme outliers and averaging the two most trustworthy readings per leaf averaged per plant, it was determined that there are significant species-specific differences in experimental response. Genovese Basil showed modest reduction in height in the experimental spectral conditions but maintained constant values in canopy width and depth relative to the control. Cilantro experienced significant reductions across all three dimensions in experimental chambers, while chervil experienced a reduction in height but a relative increase in width across conditions in only one replicate. Morning stomatal conductance averaged 0.044–0.13 mol m⁻² s⁻¹ for basil and 0.13–0.28 mol m⁻² s⁻¹ for cilantro, exceeding afternoon values by 60–120 %. These values fell within the published ranges of reported values for both well-watered basil and cilantro under optimal conditions. Therefore, minor variations in the environment have the potential to incur significant changes in plant physiology. The modest spectral shift therefore influenced plant architecture and stomatal physiology in a species‑dependent manner, with potential implications for nutrient yield and water‑use efficiency. Our findings underscore the importance of routine spectral calibration in CEA systems and highlight the need to account for diurnal variation when interpreting physiological measurements.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".