A major imbalance exists at present between the volume of information
published about the environmental requirements of the world's most commercially
important plant species and that published on the thousands of
other species of significance to mankind. The main cause of this problem
appears to be the high cost of examining the environmental relationships of
plants by conventional methods. These methods usually require considerable
instrumentation and often the use of controlled environment cabinets which
are expensive to run and too small to accommodate many important lesserknown
plants.