Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA - including greenhouses, vertical farms, and polytunnel systems) represents a rapidly advancing frontier in plant science and food production. By decoupling plant growth from natural environmental variability, CEA enables precise manipulation of factors such as light, temperature, humidity, CO₂ concentration, and nutrient availability.

These technologies provide unique opportunities to uncover the quantitative principles that govern plant performance under tightly managed conditions, while also raising new biological questions about how plants perceive, integrate, and respond to artificial growth environments. They further prompt reflection on how adaptation and selection may differ under such artificial conditions, where optimisation for performance can come at the expense of robustness and resilience to fluctuating environments. At the same time, CEA systems present their own shortcomings, including high energy and material demands, altered plant–microbe and pest dynamics, and uncertain long-term sustainability, highlighting the need for critical, data-driven assessment of their biological and ecological implications.

This themed collection of Quantitative Plant Biology invites contributions that apply quantitative, mechanistic, and data-driven approaches to explore plant responses in CEA systems. We welcome studies that link controlled environmental factors to physiological, biochemical, morphological, and yield-related traits, as well as sensory and nutritional attributes of crops. We also welcome critical articles uncovering the shortcomings associated with controlled environments. Submissions may also address aspects of system design and materials testing, automation and robotics, sensor integration, or pest and disease interactions, provided that the primary focus remains on plant biology (e.g., performance vs. robustness).

We encourage interdisciplinary work combining plant physiology, systems biology, engineering, materials science, and computational modelling to advance our quantitative understanding of plant behaviour in managed environments. Research that bridges laboratory and production scales, or that develops new analytical or modelling frameworks for CEA data, is particularly encouraged.

 

Submissions are open.

Guest Editors

Sven Batke, Edge Hill University, UK 

Emilia Mikulewicz, Cultiva EcoSolutions