Growth chamber for enhanced forest management

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Controlled growth facilities offer researchers the opportunity to grow plants in experimentally defined conditions that cannot be achieved in the field.  The proposed purchase of a walk-in growth chamber will provide us with an opportunity to execute a wide range of ecological and ecophysiological studies over the next decades.  These include: interactions of feathermosses with the nutrition of boreal conifers; the functionality of root grafts in aspen clones; the factors controlling the development of aspen seedlings; interactions of aspen growth and morphology with defoliation events of forest tent caterpillars; the ecophysiology of understory species in relation to different light intensity and temperature and the growth role of ectomycorrhizal fungi under different conditions.  The growth chamber will be used 365 days a year and at least 3 young scientists per year will be able to use this chamber to ask innovative research questions over the coming decades.