Advances in controlled environment agriculture

With concerns about the impact of global warming in increasing the risk and unpredictability of adverse weather conditions, there is growing interest in various types of controlled environment agriculture (CEA), from the relatively simple screen and net houses designed to create more favourable microclimates for crops to hermetic plant factories with fully-controlled environments. Advances in controlled environment agriculture provides a detailed review of current research on different CEA systems, including those that rely on simple passive climate control strategies, to approaches that support a high level of technical control. The book also considers ways of optimising resource use, including energy, light, water nutrients and substrates, as well as implementation strategies for rural, peri-urban and urban applications. The book builds on a successful range of earlier volumes published by Burleigh Dodds Science: Achieving sustainable greenhouse cultivation (2019), Advances in horticultural soilless culture (2020) and Advances in plant factories: New technologies in indoor vertical farming (2023). Edited by two world-renowned experts, the book will be a standard reference for university and other researchers in horticultural science, agricultural engineers specialising in the construction of controlled environment agriculture systems, as well as government and private sector agencies supporting agricultural innovation and sustainable crop production. Dr Oliver Körner is a Senior Scientist and Head of the Department of Next-Generation Horticultural Systems (HORTSYS) at the world-renowned Leibniz Institute of Vegetable and Ornamental Crops (IGZ), Germany. He leads the HORTSYS 2 Research Group and is Acting Head of the PA HORTSYS Research Group. Dr Körner is internationally known for his expertise in the controlled environment cultivation of horticultural crops, particularly modelling plant-environment interactions in protected cultivation. Dr Gundula Proksch is an Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture within the College of Built Environments at the University of Washington, USA, where she is also an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture. She is Founding Director of the Circular City + Living Systems Lab (CSSL), an interdisciplinary group applying circular economy principles to building and city design. Professor Proksch is Principal Investigator of the National Science Foundation-funded CITIFOODS Project which is investigating the broader development of aquaponic systems in urban environments.