Abstract
Light is one of the most important factors for photosynthetic organisms to grow. Historically, the amount of light in plant sciences has been referred to as light intensity, irradiance, photosynthetic active radiation, photon flux, photon flux density, etc. On occasion, all these terms are used interchangeably, yet they refer to different physical units and each metric offers distinct information. Even for experts in the fields of plant photobiology, the use of these terms is confusing, and there is a loose implementation of each concept. This makes the use of radiometric units even more confusing to non-experts when looking for ways to measure light, since they could easily feel overwhelmed by the specialized literature. The use of scientific concepts must be accurate, as ambiguity in the use of radiometric quantities can lead to inconsistencies in analysis, thus decreasing the comparability between experiments and to the formulation of incorrect experimental designs. In this review, we provide a simple yet comprehensive view of the use of radiometric quantities in an effort to clarify their meaning and applications. To facilitate understanding, we adopt a minimum amount of mathematical expressions and provide a historical summary of the use of radiometry (with emphasis on plant sciences), examples of uses, and a review of the available instrumentation for radiometric measurements.
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Data are available under reasonable request. Please contact AZ through alonso.zavaleta@anu.edu.au.
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Acknowledgements
All figures used in this work were made by the authors using PowerPoint, SketchUp 2019, and Python 3.
Alonso Zavafer is a pseudonym of Alonso Zavaleta Fernández de Córdova.
The authors would like to thank Eric Prince and Kristin Feese (LI-COR Biosciences) for providing information about the response of the detectors.
AZ would like to thank Prof. Wah Soon Chow for the insightful discussions on the definition of “photon irradiance.”
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AZ: investigation, software, conceptualization, methodology, validation, visualization, data curation, writing—original draft, formal analysis, writing—review and editing, resources, administration. CM: conceptualization, methodology, validation, writing—original draft, visualization, writing—review and editing, supervision, resources. GJ: validation, formal analysis, writing—review and editing, supervision. KM: investigation, conceptualization, validation, writing—original draft, writing—review and editing, supervision, resources.
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Zavafer, A., Mancilla, C., Jolley, G. et al. On the concepts and correct use of radiometric quantities for assessing the light environment and their application to plant research. Biophys Rev 15, 385–400 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12551-023-01051-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12551-023-01051-y