68. PROMETHEUS

Organised by Lawren Sack (UCLA), Will Cornwell (U British Columbia) and Lou Santiago (UC Riverside), to be held at Australian National University, Canberra. First meeting 27-30 October, 2009	PARTICIPANTS INCLUDE Lawren Sack - UCLA (USA) Will Cornwell - U British Columbia (Canada) Louis Santiago - UC Riverside (USA) John Evans - Australian National University Brendan Choat - ANU Margaret Barbour - Landcare Research, New Zealand Adrienne Nicotra - ANU Rana Munns - CSIRO Plant Industry
Oct 09>

GOAL

Science moves most rapidly when the majority of researchers use similar methods and can easily and rapidly repeat and build upon each other’s discoveries. There is a strong need for standardizing in physiological ecology, as currently many groups utilize different methods and protocols for specialized as well as common measurements (Table 1). There is currently no easy resource to access these protocols or to determine the opinions of experts on the different practices, and this creates a bottleneck in research and student education. While there has been recent work toward standardizing measurements of “key functional traits" with simple equipment (e.g., Cornelissen et al., 2003), physiology and environmental measures, which are in many cases more complicated, have proven more resistant to standardization. We expect that an effort to standardize methods in plant physiological ecology will cause this methods-intensive discipline to flourish due to increased accessibility and demystification of approaches.

Table 1. Examples of methods in plant physiological ecology for which different groups use sometimes disparate methods, and there is no resource to access step-by-step protocols
1. Pressure-volume curves
2. Leaf, stem and root hydraulic conductance and vulnerability
3. Sap flow
4. Gas exchange: maximum rates, A-Ci curves, light response, VPD response
5. Psychrometry
6. Wood density
7. Biomechanics Modulus of elasticity, fracture toughness
8. Microclimatology (irradiance, weather station data)
9. Canopy structure, leaf area index, leaf area: sapwood area
10. Root structure, root area

We propose a working group to create a structure that will facilitate the organization and standardization of methods. This is essential to our long-term research and education, and is one of the most important steps to really help our science advance. In effect we would be updating the book Plant Physiological Ecology: Field Methods and Instrumentation ("pink book"; Pearcy et al., 1989). That book is now out of print, with a used price of US$250, and though it is now out of date, for lack of an update, it is still essential. That book covered the then-current methods in photosynthesis, environmental data, water relations, root physiology, canopy measurements. A new resource is needed to cover that breadth, but also capitalizing on the new technology available for community involvement and web access.

Thus, we propose to create a web wiki as a repository and commentary, easily and constantly updated, for protocols and methods in plant physiological ecology. This web resource, PROocols, METHods, Explanations and Updated Standards Wiki (PROMETHEUS Wiki; Prometheus of Greek Myth having been the Titan who first bestowed fire, at the time the greatest standardized technology).

This web resource will allow one to upload one’s lab protocols into given topics, and these would be indexed. Additionally, once the methods and protocols in a given field are comprehensively posted online, a group of "editors" would write a mini-review of methods and also submitted for publication; such reviews could be updated as appropriate to developments in the field. There would be possibility for comments and public questions and responses on protocols as well. With this framework we would gather the updated protocols used by leading labs around the world and put these online with annotation.

All this would lead to better standardizing of methods to allow research from around the world to improve by being directly comparable. Such directly comparable data will facilitate system-level analyses of physiological and ecological data. This is especially important given current efforts to collect of data at multiple sites in parallel by networks such as the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) and the international long-term ecological research (I-LTER) system, interested in monitoring the impacts of global climate change, and the need for plant physiology to be determined accurately on a global scale for dynamic global vegetation models. This resource would also allow student learning of up-to-date methods from protocols online. In some cases there may be a high level of disagreement as to which methods are best or most workable, but the wiki process would re-focus discussion on further understanding of methods, which would lead to subsequent discoveries as well as quickly and efficiently determining best practices.

Last Updated June 2009