A critical characteristic of plant development is the strong influence of environmental factors as modulators of developmental programs. Among those factors, light, temperature and nutriend availability dominate developmental decisions, and can dramatically alter plant shape, biomass production and fruit set –all of them important agronomic traits. Research during the past thirty years has defined different molecular mechanisms by which plants perceive environmental signals and transduce this information into changes in gene expression and other cellular processes, ultimately triggering the appropriate adaptive responses.

A very important conclusion from recent studies is therefore that environmental pathways (light, temperature, nutrients), hormone signaling and the circadian clock represent a cluster of highly interconnected sub-networks, and the architecture of this web very likely explains key features of the plastic behaviour that plants display with respect to changing environments.

Despite the relatively high level of understanding of how plants sense and integrate environmental signals to control development, a critical note of caution is that our current view is mainly based in research performed in model organisms grown under controlled environments.

However, the relative contribution of these mechanisms might be very different when plants grow in more natural environments, where variable combinations of environmental factors are met, and one standing question is whether the signaling elements known through the analysis in constant conditions are equally relevant under the combination of different environmental factors.

The main goal of this consortium is to identify the gene networks controlling plant growth and development under complex environmental conditions, paying particular attention to the influence of light and temperature regimes on plant performance under contrasting N avalilability conditions.