Editing Phytotron (section)

==Overview==
[[File:CSIRO Phytotron Rear View Close Up.jpg|thumb|Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO)'s phytotron in Canberra, Australia]]
[[File:New agriculture 1.jpg|thumb|A fertilizing robot and a phytotron at the laboratory of the Biogenet company in Józefów, Poland]]

Phytotrons unified and extended earlier piecemeal efforts to claim total control of the whole environment. In both walk-in rooms and smaller reach-in cabinets, phytotrons produced and reproduced whole complex climates of many variables. In the first phytotrons each individual room was held at a constant unique temperature. The Australian phytotron, for example, had rooms maintaining 9°C, 12°C, 16°C, 20°C, 23°C, 26°C, 30°C, 34°C. Because some of the earliest controlled environment experiments showed that plants reacted differently in daytime temperatures and nighttime temperatures, the first experiments to observe the effect(s) of varying the daytime versus the nighttime temperature saw experimenters move their plants from higher to lower temperatures over the course of a daily, or any other variable or constant, routine.<ref>{{Cite web |date=2023-11-14 |title=What Temperature Should A Greenhouse Be At Night? |url=https://greenhouseemporium.com/what-temperature-should-a-greenhouse-be-at-night/ |access-date=2023-11-21 |language=en-US}}</ref> This rendered the variable “temperature” experimentally controllable.

Even a brute force approach that tested each successive environmental variable and every variety of plant would serve to pinpoint specific environmental conditions to maximize growth. Expecting that more knowledge would surely come from greater technology, the next generation of phytotrons expanded in technological reach, in their ranges of environmental variables, and also in the degree of control over each variable. The phytotron in Stockholm offered a humidity controlled room and a custom built computer, as well as a low temperature room that extended the temperature range down to -25°C for the study of Nordic forests. After that, phytotron technology compressed whole environments into smaller cabinets able to be set to any desired combination of environmental conditions, which are still in use today.