Environmental Control for Greenhouse Crops

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue is dedicated to “Environmental Control of Greenhouse Crops”. Greenhouse crops are one of the main development kingpins of primary production.

Glasshouses or plastic greenhouses have long been used worldwide to promote the growth of plants for the production of fruits, vegetables, and flowers, especially during cold periods of the year. Climatic factors such as solar radiation, temperature, humidity, CO₂ concentration, and wind speed interact with the greenhouse structure and the crop to produce the greenhouse climate. Understanding these interactions is very important, such that they can be modified to provide as near to optimum conditions as possible for crop growth.

Energy balance equations are used to construct models which permit prediction of climatic conditions in a greenhouse from outside weather conditions given certain properties of the structure and crops.

Apart from the attention given to control of the aerial environment of greenhouse crops, it must be emphasised that soil environment is also of great importance. The main factors of soil environment, namely temperature, water status, nutrition, and soil volume, must all be at or near their optimum values if the full effects of an optimum aerial environment are to be achieved.

In a universal market, the greenhouse product should be of excellent quality in order to be competitive. In addition, innovative techniques should be applied to protect human health and the natural environment, which favours the sustainability of agricultural ecosystems.

The cost of heating and cooling, in order to create optimum conditions for both better quality and higher yields, are the major sources of production expenditures in terms of both initial investment and annual operational costs.

The cost of energy consumed during cold periods ranges from around 50% up to 80% of the total annual operational costs. This fact influences the price of products. Therefore, any effort to save energy is of great importance.

For this Special Issue, potential topics to be covered include, but are not limited to, the following:

1. Environmental analysis
2. Energy conservation
3. Heating and cooling systems
4. Supplementary and photoperiodic lighting
5. Use of renewable energy sources to control the environment (heating and cooling)
6. CO₂ enrichment
7. Ventilation (natural, fan ventilation)
8. Computational fluid dynamics
9. Covering materials

Prof. Dr. Chrysoula Nikita-Martzopoulou
Guest Editor

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