Climate Chambers (3 Chambers)

• Subject Area: Plant Sciences
• Term: Funded in 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 556650679

Climate change is one of the most fundamental challenges for ecosystems and human societies. These changes, both directly and indirectly shaping extreme weather events, are not only costly phenomena for the world economy: the implications and reverberations of these events are felt across species ranging from plants to non-human and human animals. In this context, one of the most fatal factors causing adverse effects are the rising temperatures. Warmer temperatures over time change weather patterns, cause metabolic adaptations, disrupt species interactions and negatively impact human health. Natural and life sciences face two options to study the effect of predicted climate change: predictive modelling or controlled experiments. Ideally, the results of a predictive model can be validated by controlled experiments. However, experiments on climate change require precise control over parameters such as temperature, humidity, and light. Experiments further require replications and enough space to simulate realistic conditions. Such spatial requirements may be small for bacteria or animal and plant model organisms (e.g., Drosophila, Arabidopsis). They need to be larger for other organisms such as trees or humans. They also need to be larger to observe natural behavior or to simulate natural communities in mesocosm-style. Providing a parallel system of three independently controllable and fine-tuned environmental conditions in container-sized spaces, such as climate chambers provide, is a prerequisite for a variety of research across disciplines and interactions among disciplines. It allows for comparative experiments with plants, insects and humans and conducting research on ecological processes and physiological reactions. The strategic hiring at the Universität Oldenburg in the areas of biodiversity and navigation in the last (animal physiology, vegetation ecology) and the coming years (entomology, soil ecology, plant functional ecology, animal biodiversity) will require more sophisticated instruments to conduct relevant research on climate change adaptation, especially in the interest of future collaborative projects. The aspired technology adds a new dimension to existing equipment and facilities at the Universität Oldenburg, because (1) the qualitative regulation of environmental parameters is especially precise and adjustments speedy, (2) the substantial space allows for research on humans, large plants, insect populations, biotic interactions (plants and insects), and mesocosm-like simulations, and (3) having three parallel units allows for direct comparison under different conditions and fast conduct of comparative research designs. The instrument will be operated at the Botanical Garden of Oldenburg, making climate change research of the University visible to the approximately 100,000 visitors of the garden each year.

• DFG Programme: Major Research Instrumentation
• Major Instrumentation: Klimakammern (3 Kammern)
• Instrumentation Group: 9830 Heizungs- und Klimaanlagen, Lüftung, Klimakammern, fest installiert (außer 287, 848 und 994)
• Applicant Institution: Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg
• Leader: Professor Dr. Dirk Albach