A mass participatory experiment provides a rich temporal profile of temperature response in spring onions

Abstract

Plants modulate their growth rates based on the environmental signals; however, it is difficult to experimentally test how natural temperature and light fluctuations affect growth, since realistic outdoor environments are difficult to replicate in controlled laboratory conditions, and it is expensive to conduct experiments in many environmentally diverse regions. In partnership with BBC Terrific Scientific, over 50 primary schools from around the UK grew spring onions outside of hydroponic growth chambers that they constructed. Over 2 weeks, students measured the height of the spring onions daily, while the hourly temperature and visibility data were determined for each school based on the UK Meteorological Office data. This rich time series data allowed us to model how plants integrate temperature and light signals to determine how much to grow, using techniques from functional data analysis. We determined that under nutrient‐poor hydroponic conditions, growth of spring onion is sensitive to even a few degrees change in temperature, and is most correlated with warm nighttime temperatures, high temperatures at the start of the experiment, and light exposure near the end of the experiment. We show that scientists can leverage schools to conduct experiments that leverage natural environmental variability to develop complex models of plant‐environment interactions.

The Impact of the Daily Mile™ on School Pupils’ Fitness, Cognition, and Wellbeing: Findings From Longer Term Participation

“…BBC Terrific Scientific 4 is a project aiming to support young people learning about science through citizen science. Briefly, citizen science characterises generally large scale research studies which involve members of the public in data collection (e.g., Brestovitsky and Ezer, 2019 ). The BBC Terrific Scientific programme encourages mass participation of school pupils in real world academic research in the United Kingdom.…”

A citizen science study of short physical activity breaks at school: improvements in cognition and wellbeing with self-paced activity

“…Terrific Scientific investigations link mass participation of school pupils to research conducted by UK universities (e.g. [14]) and support children learning about science whilst producing valuable data. Teaching resources were supplied to schools, and teachers used their discretion to determine how to support pupils' science learning (e.g.…”

The Potential Role of School Citizen Science Programs in Infectious Disease Surveillance: A Critical Review

“…While there were some issues in data reporting, most of the data was valid. Student engagement was not reported [ 58 ].…”

“…Some of the school projects noted issues with data misidentification and misinterpretation such as distinguishing plastic and natural debris [ 46 , 47 ], recognizing bumblebee color groups [ 39 ] and determining the range for water quality results based on a colorimetric method [ 57 ]. Other studies had reporting issues due to missing or incomplete measurements, photographs or information, which led to rejection of datasets [ 48 , 55 , 58 ]. To account for these limitations, creating detailed yet simplified protocols and providing proper training [ 46 , 47 , 48 ], increases the quality of data collected by students and can match that of scientists [ 46 ].…”