A tremendous but non-systematic effort has been made during the past 60 years to characterize the response of a wide array of plant species to their environment. This has happened at various levels, such as biochemistry, physiology, anatomy as well as at the level of whole-plant carbon budget and growth. As a result, a large number of phenotypic data are publicly available. Unfortunately, this information is not unified in a quantitative and structured way which allows for a comparative analysis. My aim is to fill this important gap by building a large database containing the environmental responses of circa 40 growth-related variables for a range of plant species. In this talk I focus on 3 topics:

1. How can we generalize across different experiments and species?

2. How do plants respond to 12 of the most important environmental constraints? That is: what is the form of the response curve and to what extent can we order the magnitude of the responses for the various environmental factors?

3. Are there systematic differences between groups of species in the response curves (either among functional groups of species or between families?

This approach - that I refer to as ‘meta-phenomics’ - not only will serve as a benchmark for future and comprehensive phenotyping efforts, but it will also represent a very valuable tool per se in understanding the integrated response of plants to their environment.