Lucien Ferrer
Artificial Lighting Effect on Plants:
By: Lucien Ferrer
Plants, in some cases may be physically small, but regardless of size, every plant takes on a unique role to help contribute to the Earth’s ecosystem. Plants help contribute to the Earth’s ecosystem by providing many beneficial resources to living things such as, food and oxygen. What makes plants such a unique species on Earth, is how plants are able to sustain themselves without traveling compared to other mobile living things. Furthermore a plant can only survive on light energy, in a process called “Photosynthesis”.
Photosynthesis is a process where light energy is converted into chemical energy to help support organisms activities that is needed to survive. The two chemicals produced are NADPH and ATP, which are generally consumed throughout the production of organic molecules and carbon atoms. This is a process that is very unique to plants and Cyanobacteria. Due to the fact that plants are able to produce food through light leads o idea if plants could be theoretically be grown in artificial lighting. The problem with artificial lighting is the failure to fully clone the same energy and light spectrum in natural lighting. However, with the current modern day technology artificial lighting can now target specific wavelength to ensure proper enrichment.
Oddly enough, every color affects the growth of a plant differently by specifically targeting the photosynthetic organisms for growth. Plants need short wavelengths, because longer wavelengths produce lower amounts of energy. Which correlates to each colo having a unique individual wavelength frequency which happens to encourage certain growth traits.
In the experiment I conducted I used different colored artificial lighting which were, blue, green, and red colored light bulbs to record each affects the growth in real life. Each artificial light drastically affected the overall growth of the plant, as specifically shown using red lighting. What caused the plant to significantly grow more under the blue light was because blue lighting primarily targets a plant to flower.
Green lighting affects plants differently, but not in the most beneficial way. Surprisingly, even having one of the lower wavelengths on the light spectrum, plants can’t use green lighting effectively. Artificial green lighting has a wavelength of 495-570 nm, compared to smaller wavelengths such as violets 380-450 nm. Since plants are naturally green, growth in green lighting is the least effective due to the pigment chlorophyll. Which is why shown in the experiment I conducted, the plant grown in green was the most malnourished. In my experiment the second plant that grew the best in artificial lighting was grown under red lighting.
The reasoning behind this is that red artificial lighting shares similar values to blue lighting. Due to red lighting having a long wavelength of 620-75 nm length, even with a longer length still grows more efficient than green. Artificial red lighting is like blue light, both similarly encourages vegetative leaf growth even when combined. The color of artificial lighting that most successfully grew a green bean was the red light.
As surprising as it seems blue lighting grew green beans better. With blue being the second smallest main color wavelength of 450-495 nm. As previously mentioned blue light is the best at encouraging vegetative leaf growth. Blue lighting has shown to be the most effective at growing beans under artificial lighting compared to the other colors green and red.
All in all despite a plants size, all plants contribute to the Earth’s ecosystem. Plants produce oxygen into the Earth and consume carbon dioxide which helps sustain life while being a unique species that manages to self sustain itself while being mobile by producing food through photosynthesis using either natural or artificial lighting. Which comes to the idea, if the benefits of all colors could be combined to make one LED light to most adequately grow a plant.