Main goal is to establish dose-response relationships of a wide range of phenotypic traits for a large set of a-biotic environmental factors.
These studies have yielded a lot of insight into the way plants respond to the environment, but may be challenging to integrate by means of a classical meta-analysis.
Rather than evaluating the difference between ‘low-CO2’ and ‘high-CO2’ grown plants, it would be better to derive dose-response curves which take into account at which CO2 levels experiments were carried out.
Metaphenomics uses a method to calculate dose-response curves from a variety of experiments, and is applicable to any phenotypic trait and many environmental variables.
Subsequently, general dose-response curves can be derived by fitting mathematical equations to the data.