Fig. 4

Plots used for quality control. a A line plot of the growth curves for all individual plants faceted on the applied treatment. Plants with negative derivatives in the growth curves are usually not detected correctly and may be excluded. Here, condensation had formed in one plate obscuring a seedling resulting in inaccurate area estimation. b Boxplots with plant areas per day. Plates with outliers or very large or small areas may have technical problems. In this case, seedlings in plate091 are much smaller than all other plants. The quality control image shows that the seedlings were accurately detected suggesting a technical problem with the growing conditions of for this particular plate. Thanks to the high replication, such extreme plates can safely be left out from the analysis