Accurately programming complex light regimes with multichannel LEDs

Advances in LED lighting technologies enable increasingly complex light regimes, providing greater insight into plants’ responses to dynamic light – such as seasonality and fluctuating conditions – rather than the traditional discrete (i.e., on/off) lighting. However, current methods of programming such regimes are time-consuming and/or limited to 1–2 wavebands. Robust methods are therefore needed to accurately programme multichannel/waveband LED lighting systems. We present a multistep, multidimensional algorithm to accurately programme multi-waveband LED lights. This algorithm accounts for non-linearity between intensity settings and measured light quantity output, as well as optical crosstalk between channels of different wavebands. It outperforms methods that treat waveband channels as independent variables, allowing users to more accurately programme multichannel light regimes. This will allow the community to probe plant responses to dynamically changing light spectra. We have made this algorithm available as an R package, LightFitR (installable from CRAN with ‘install.packages(“LightFitR”)’.