Te Whenua Tupu - the Living Lab
Te Whenua Tupu
The Living Lab
Te Whenua Tupu
Te Whenua Tupu, the Living Lab, is our controlled environment facility in Marlborough, where we look above and below the surface to understand how changes to the environment impact on how plants grow.
Through a system of sensor technologies, the Living Lab allows scientists to conduct research that not only monitors the plants themselves but also the soil to understand what’s happening from the roots through to the canopy. Based within a 600m2 shelter, the climate, light, water and nutrients are all tightly controlled to determine the impact of any changes on the productive system.
We’re using the Living Lab to support our research into grape and other perennial horticulture systems, but the facility can also be used by innovators to test and refine new tools and technologies before taking them into real-world scenarios. The facility also includes covered outdoor education spaces to support training of students, growers and industry representatives.
The Living Lab supports research that requires:
Range of cored (silty) or reconstituted (gravelly) soils, representative of typical New Zealand horticultural land
Outdoor, protected growing conditions and monitored soil temperatures
Clearance and pot size to accommodate a broad range of crops, including tree crops
Automated and monitored control of inputs (water, fertiliser etc)
Non-destructive root observation and minimally invasive rhizosphere biopsy
Correlation of root observations with detailed (3D) soil moisture depletion profiles
Accurate measurement of below-ground gas exchange and soil atmosphere conditions
Accurate measruement and partition of above-ground gas exchange
Detailed above-ground phenotyping
At the Living Lab, we have the potential to establish long-term perennial horticulture experiments before root restriction becomes a problem, and can overlay a wide range of scientific and collaborative studies.
Te Whenua Tupu, the Living Lab, is owned by the Marlborough Research Centre Trust and based at the Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology’s (NMIT) Blenheim campus. The experimental facilities are managed by Plant & Food Research, while the teaching annex is used for industry workshops and for teaching students at NMIT studying viticulture and horticultural production. Development of the new $3.3 million facility was supported by the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment’s Provincial Growth Fund.
