ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the obstacles and discuss opportunities associated with fostering a low-carbon economy and advancing bioenergy businesses. It delves into the challenges that arise when implementing analysis protocols and conducting plant research with EcoFABs. The goal of these new capabilities is to empower scientists in the field to study plant morphology in greater depth and to fine-tune the Autonomous Experiment system for automated management of plants using EcoFABs. After a series of scientific meetings and workshops that were held between 2016 and 2019, microbial and plant ecologists, biologists, and modelers combined expertise to determine the necessary features for model fabricated ecosystems that could bridge the gap between the study of cultures of unicellular organisms and entire ecosystems. In order to analyze hyperspectral data, the authors have been exploring pipelines to extract information about plant growth and development and use it as feedback during autonomous experiments.
