ICCEG

UK Controlled Environment Users' Group

International Committee for Controlled Environment Guidelines (ICCEG)

The International Committee for Controlled Environment Guidelines was formed at the "Controlled Environments in the New Millennium" conference at the John Innes Institute, Norwich, UK, from the 9th to 12th September 2001 organised by the UK Controlled Environment Users' Group (UK CEUG) and the North American Committee on Controlled Environment Technology and Use (NCR-101, now NCERA-101). The stimulus for its formation was a paper at the meeting by L.D. Incoll, D.J. Pilbeam and J. Williams emphasizing that despite years of work of NCR-101 in establishing and publishing comprehensive guidelines for measuring and reporting environmental parameters for plant experiments in growth chambers, the actual application of the guidelines was very poor. (The guidelines were published in one form as an American National Standards Institute/American Society of Agricultural Engineers (now ASABE) Standard (first in 1982, and most recently in 2002)).The authors of this paper attributed this to the reality that many users of CEs did not have the equipment or the experience to adopt the recommendations of the guidelines. They proposed that a simpler minimum set of parameters was needed with which users of CEs would be comfortable and for which measuring instruments could be obtained reasonably easily.

At the AGM of the UK CEUG on the 10th September 2001, on the initiative of T. Tibbitts (NCR-101) and L. Incoll (UK CEUG), the three groups represented at the meeting, UK CEUG, NCR-101 and the Australasian Controlled Environment Working Group (ACEWG) agreed to set up an international committee (ICCEG) to work together to develop a set of minimum guidelines. Its membership is:

Committee - volunteer members at foundation
Name	Date joined or co-opted	Date resigned	Member of (primary membership first)	Place and country
A.J. Both *	17/09/01		NCR-101	New Brunswick, USA
Dennis H. Greer	17/09/01		ACEWG	New Zealand (now Wagga Wagga, Australia)
Lynton D. Incoll	17/09/01		UK CEUG (& NCR-101)	Leeds,UK
Rob Kerslake	17/09/01		ACEWG (& NCR-101)	Brisbane, Australia
Donald Krizek	19/12/03		NCR-101	Beltsville, USA
Ian Pearman	17/09/01	29/01/08	UK CEUG	Harpenden, UK
Mark Romer	17/09/01		NCR-101 (& UK CEUG)	Montreal, Canada
Garry Taylor	17/09/01		UK CEUG (& NCR-101)	Loughborough, UK
Ted Tibbitts **	17/09/01		NCR-101 (& UK CEUG)	Madison, USA
Co-opted committee members
Tony Agostino	11/03/02		ACEWG	Canberra, Australia
Paul Austin	13/03/02		ACEWG	Palmerston North, New Zealand
Changhoo Chun	22/03/02	5/04/07	NCR-101	Seoul, Korea
Julian Franklin	30/04/08		UK CEUG (& NCR-101)	Harpenden, UK
Geoff Holroyd	30/04/08		UK CEUG	Lancaster, UK
Keith Ingram	04/04/03	5/04/07	NCR-101	Gainesville, USA
Masaharu Kitano	29/03/02	23/04/08	UK CEUG & NCR-101	Nangoku, Japan
Yoshiaki Kitaya	22/03/02		UK CEUG & NCR-101	Osaka, Japan
Chieri Kubota	30/04/08		NCR-101	Tucson, USA
David J. Pilbeam	17/09/01			Leeds, UK

* Chairman 2004+
** Chairman 2001-2004

In the three regions represented on the committee - North America, Europe and the Pacific, controlled environments are used for experiments on plants in universities and tertiary-level colleges, government institutes and private laboratories. The proposed minimum guidelines would be for use by scientists, technical staff and engineers in all these institutions where research on plants is carried out.

Subsequently the activity of the committee has been in two areas:

1. Minimum guidelines for controlled environments for plant culture.

2. Guidelines for controlled environments for tissue culture

1. Minimum guidelines for controlled environments for plant culture

The minimum guidelines were completed in late 2003 and released as a 2-fold A4 and Letter-sized colour leaflets at the second international meeting on controlled environments "The Power to Control" organised by the ACEWG in March 2004 in Brisbane, Australia. Copies of the leaflet were distributed to all members of the three groups after the meeting and are available on request from the secretaries of the three groups.

The International Committee met on the 15th of March at the Brisbane meeting. Its business encompassed:: 1. New Minimum Guidelines:
a. Distribution, publicity and copyright
b. Additional print runs
c. Other versions of the minimum guidelines e.g. posters for display in CE facilities and at scientific meetings (see below)
d. Future revisions of the new minimum guidelines
2. Guidelines for tissue culture CE users (see below)
3. Future of the committee: The committee resolved to continue in operation but with a change of chairman

The minutes of this meeting are available for inspection.

An A3 and Ledger-sized laminated version of the guidelines was developed for posting in growth facilities or other locations to encourage researchers to use the guidelines. A packet to contain copies of the guidelines when stuck to one edge of the poster was supplied to UK CEUG and ACEWG members with the poster. P. Austin arranged for a designer to prepare the posters for commercial printing and they were printed at Palmerston North, New Zealand.

A full sized laminated poster of the guidelines was also developed that could be put up at scientific meetings to promote the use of the guidelines. Copies of this poster are available for loan from the secretaries of the groups and an abstract has been written to go with the poster.

Both posters were released to members in September-October 2004 and the committee's preferred use of all the documents is set out on the NCR-101 web site from which copies of all the documents can be downloaded.

2. Guidelines for controlled environments for tissue culture

After the second international meeting of the three groups in 2004, L. Incoll of the University of Leeds, UK, reported that G. Holroyd of Lancaster University, UK, was interested in developing guidelines for experiments using controlled environments for tissue culture because of the very different requirements for this method of growing plants, of the widespread use of tissue culture in plant molecular genetics, and of the very low standard of measuring and reporting prevalent in this area of growing plants. The committee agreed to set up a sub-committee to develop tissue culture guidelines. The membership of the resulting sub-committee is:

Tissue culture sub-committee - foundation members
Name	Date co-opted	Committee dissolved	Member of (primary membership first)	Place and country
Jacques Boccon-Gibod	28/05/04	30/04/08	UK CEUG	Angers, France
Geoffrey Holroyd *	14/07/04	30/04/08	UK CEUG	Lancaster, UK
Julian Franklin	30/07/04	30/04/08	UK CEUG	Harpenden, UK
Yoshiaki Kitaya	22/03/02	30/04/08	UK CEUG & NCR-101	Osaka, Japan
Chieri Kubota	29/03/04	30/04/08	NCR-101	Tucson, USA
Philip Larkin	28/05/04	30/04/08		Canberra, Australia
Co-opted sub-committee members
Mick Fuller	20/03/06	30/04/08	UK CEUG	Plymouth, UK
Steve Millam **	28/03/06	30/04/08	UK CEUG	Chichester, UK
Lynton Incoll ***	1/06/06	30/04/08	UK CEUG	Leeds, UK

* Chairman 2004-2006
** Chairman 2006-2007

*** Chairman 2007-2008

The tissue culture guidelines were completed in late 2007 and released as a 2-fold A4 and Letter-sized colour leaflets at the third international meeting on controlled environments "Controlled Environment Agriculture" organised by the NCERA-101 in March 2008 at Cocoa Beach, Florida, USA. Copies of the leaflet were distributed to all members of the three groups at or after the meeting and are available on request from the secretaries of the three groups.

The International Committee met on the 9th of March at the Cocoa Beach meeting. Its business encompassed:: 1. New Tissue Culture Guidelines:
    a. Approval
    b. Print runs - quantities, distribution and its funding
2. Updating of web sites containing information on guidelines
3. New and existing projects.
    a. Publicity for our published guidelines
    b. International standards
    c. Greenhouse Guidelines and GreenSys 2009 Quebec
4. Future of the ICCEG and of the Tissue Culture Sub-committee
5. Committee membership and officers

The minutes of this meeting are available for inspection.

An A3 and Ledger-sized laminated version of the tissue culture guidelines was developed for posting in tissue culture facilities or other locations to encourage researchers to use the guidelines. A packet to contain copies of the guidelines when stuck to one edge of the poster was supplied to UK CEUG and ACEWG members with the poster. P. Austin arranged for a designer to prepare the posters for commercial printing and they were printed at Palmerston North, New Zealand.

A full sized laminated poster of the tissue culture guidelines was also developed that could be put up at scientific meetings to promote the use of the guidelines. Copies of this poster are available for loan from the secretaries of the groups and an abstract has been written to go with the poster.

Both posters will be released to members in March 2008 and the committee's preferred use of all the documents is set out on the NCERA-101 web site (this link is not yet active) from which copies of all the documents can be downloaded.

The committee has a closed mailing list managed by list owners L.D. Incoll, A.J. Both and D.J. Pilbeam. This closed list facilitates communication between members of the committee. The list archives messages and documents for the committee enabling exchange and archiving of discussions and debate and providing easy access to archived messages and files.

References

a. Standards:

ANSI/ASAE Engineering Practice EP411.4 (2002) 'Guidelines for measuring and reporting parameters for plant experiments in growth chambers'. ASAE, 2950 Niles Road, St Joseph, MI 490850-9659, USA

International Committee on Controlled Environment Guidelines (2004) Minimum guidelines for measuring and reporting environmental parameters for experiments on plants in growth rooms and chambers

b. Web sites for addresses of group secretaries:

1. UK CEUG: http://www.ceug.ac.uk/

2. NCERA-101: http://ncr101.montana.edu/

3. ACEWG: ?

L.D. Incoll
Leeds
14th April 2008