1 Introduction

Dendrobium officinale is a precious perennial orchid medicinal plant that has long been used in China as both a traditional medicine and a functional food. It is recorded in early materia medica and is officially included in the Chinese Pharmacopoeia, and its dried stems are widely consumed directly or processed into “Tiepi Fengdou” products (Yuan et al., 2020; Xu et al., 2022). Modern phytochemical studies show that D. officinale contains abundant polysaccharides, alkaloids, flavonoids, phenolic acids, amino acids, bibenzyls, phenanthrenes, and other constituents, among which polysaccharides are generally regarded as the principal active components and an important quality indicator (Tan et al., 2023; Lai et al., 2024). These compounds underpin a broad range of reported bioactivities, including immunomodulatory, antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, hypoglycemic, gastrointestinal protective, hepatoprotective, cardiovascular protective, anti-osteoporosis, and neuroprotective effects, giving D. officinale substantial medicinal, nutritional, and commercial value (Chen et al., 2021; Duan et al., 2022). In recent years, this species has attracted increasing attention from the medicine, health food, and cosmetics sectors, and its stems, leaves, and flowers are all being explored for diversified product development and higher-value utilization (Li et al., 2025; Wang et al., 2025).

Despite its high resource value, the industrial development of D. officinale has long been constrained by the scarcity of wild resources, low natural reproduction rate, slow growth, and historically heavy dependence on natural habitats. Wild populations are limited, and increasing market demand has intensified the contradiction between resource protection and industrial supply (Cheng et al., 2026). To address this problem, artificial rapid propagation based on tissue culture has been widely adopted and has become an essential foundation of the modern Dendrobium industry, while new varieties, technical procedures, and standardized cultivation systems have gradually improved industrial capacity (Cheng et al., 2026). Since the beginning of the new century, artificial cultivation of D. officinale has made major progress, and greenhouse cultivation, semi-wild cultivation, bionic-facility cultivation, original ecological cultivation, pot cultivation, and epiphytic cultivation have all been developed in response to different production goals (Tan et al., 2023). However, as industrial expansion has shifted supply from wild collection to artificial production, ensuring that cultivated material retains desirable medicinal quality has become a central scientific and practical issue (Yuan et al., 2020; Yang et al., 2026).

Against this background, wild-simulated and facility cultivation have emerged as two representative development paths for D. officinale. Facility cultivation emphasizes controllable environmental conditions, efficient seedling establishment, and relatively high yield, making it an important mode for stable large-scale production. By contrast, wild-simulated cultivation seeks to reconstruct natural or near-natural habitat conditions, so that the ecological environment, plant morphology, and quality traits are closer to those of wild materials. Existing studies indicate that cultivation mode substantially affects the accumulation of active ingredients and the overall metabolite profile. Environmental variables such as temperature, humidity, sunshine duration, pH, and soil nutrients are key drivers of medicinal quality, while light, water, and nutrient supply also influence growth and secondary metabolite accumulation (Yuan et al., 2020; Zhang et al., 2024). Comparative studies further show that wild or wild-simulated materials often contain higher levels of some major active constituents than greenhouse-grown materials, although the pattern is not uniform across all compounds or cultivation settings: one D. officinale study found wild plants had the highest polysaccharide content, whereas another found stone epiphytic and greenhouse cultivation exceeded live-tree epiphytic cultivation in polysaccharides, while stone epiphytic plants showed the richest differential metabolite accumulation and strongest antioxidant activity (Yang et al., 2023). Greenhouse cultivation also reshapes environmental drivers and biological interactions, including shifts in high-quality production zones and differences in root fungal endophyte communities that correlate with polysaccharide accumulation. In addition, evidence from related Dendrobium species suggests that wild-simulated cultivation can provide better quality and economic returns, and may also offer lower carbon emissions and global warming potential than facility cultivation (Yi et al., 2021).

This study investigats the differences between wild-simulated and facility cultivation modes of Dendrobium officinale and their effects on plant growth, quality formation, and industrial development. By systematically comparing the two cultivation modes in terms of growth environment, morphological characteristics, yield formation, active compound accumulation, and quality evaluation, this study aims to clarify the impacts of different cultivation strategies on the medicinal value and industrial attributes of D. officinale. Available evidence indicates that with efficient utilization. Furthermore, this study will contribute to the transition of D. officinale production from a yield-oriented approach toward quality improvement, ecological coordination, and sustainable development, thereby providing theoretical support for the modernization of the D. officinale industry and the high-value utilization of medicinal plant resources.

2 Biological Characteristics and Cultivation Basis of Dendrobium officinale

2.1 Growth characteristics and ecological adaptability

Dendrobium officinale is a perennial epiphytic orchid with slow growth and high environmental sensitivity, which helps explain both its rarity in nature and the need for protected or semi-natural cultivation (Ding et al., 2018; Jia et al., 2022; Hou et al., 2025). Wild populations are limited not only by overexploitation but also by biological constraints, including low seed-setting rates, lack of seed endosperm, and dependence on symbiosis with endophytic fungi for natural germination (Liu et al., 2025b; Luo et al., 2024). As an epiphyte, D. officinale is adapted to growing on trees, rocks, or other well-aerated supports rather than in compact agricultural soils, and this ecological background remains the biological basis for current stone- and tree-attached production systems (Tan et al., 2023). Current industrial cultivation therefore relies heavily on tissue culture propagation and artificial seedling production to compensate for its low natural reproductive efficiency and endangered status.

Its ecological adaptability is notable but conditional. D. officinale shows physiological flexibility in carbon assimilation, functioning as a facultative CAM plant in which the balance between C3 and CAM photosynthesis shifts with environmental conditions. Decreasing substrate water content induces a more typical CAM pattern, while rewatering promotes a return toward mixed C3-CAM behavior, indicating an adaptive response to intermittent water deficit common in epiphytic habitats. This plasticity supports survival under drought, heat, and nutrient limitation, but adaptation is not unlimited: karst forest cultivation often faces severe water shortage, slow growth, and low yield, and recent work shows that combined high temperature and drought stress can markedly impair morphology, antioxidative status, yield, and polysaccharide accumulation, with clear differences among germplasm types (Gao et al., 2026). Endophytic and mycorrhizal fungi are therefore not incidental associates but part of its adaptive strategy, because they can improve growth, drought tolerance, disease resistance, and overall stress resilience (Li et al., 2021).

2.2 Requirements for light, temperature, humidity, and substrate

The growth and quality formation of D. officinale depend strongly on coordinated regulation of light, temperature, humidity, and water status. Multiple studies identify light, temperature, and water as major environmental cues affecting photosynthesis, growth rate, and active-compound synthesis (Zhang et al., 2024). D. officinale is a photosensitive plant, and inappropriate shading leads to unstable yield and quality . Evidence from light-gradient experiments indicates that moderate light is preferable to either extreme: under 11 000 lx, plants achieved peak biomass, maximal bioactive compound yield, superior fresh-consumption quality, and lower oxidative stress, whereas excessive light increased antioxidant enzyme activity and structural carbohydrate accumulation but suppressed plant height and edible quality. Greenhouse trials likewise found that 50~70% shade improved growth and biomass, while red light favored biomass production and increased polysaccharide and alkaloid contents (Nguyen et al., 2023).

Temperature and humidity must also be controlled within a relatively narrow ecological window. D. officinale has strict climatic requirements, and quality-related components are significantly associated with ecological variables such as maximum and minimum relative humidity, maximum temperature, and sunshine duration (Yuan et al., 2020). Recent synthesis further suggests that breaking the coupling of high temperature and high humidity is important for preventing southern blight, highlighting that warm and moist conditions are beneficial only when they do not cross the threshold for disease outbreaks (Liu et al., 2025b). Substrate conditions are equally important because this species is epiphytic and requires a loose, breathable rooting environment rather than dense field soil (Ding et al., 2018). Pine bark-based substrates appear especially suitable: one study reported high flavonoid accumulation in pine bark substrate (Zhang et al., 2024), while greenhouse-grown plants in physiological experiments were maintained successfully in a mixed substrate of pine bark fractions, perlite, and composted sawdust. Nutrient supply also shapes quality traits, as potassium treatment significantly increased anthocyanin accumulation and flavonoid-related metabolic responses, indicating that substrate fertility management is part of quality-oriented cultivation rather than merely biomass production (Jia et al., 2022).

2.3 Environmental regulation under different cultivation modes

The two main artificial production pathways for D. officinale are facility cultivation and wild-simulated or semi-wild cultivation, and the environmental regulation logic of these systems differs fundamentally (Yang et al., 2026). Facility cultivation emphasizes controllability, using greenhouse structures and monitoring systems to stabilize light, humidity, substrate moisture, and temperature. In related greenhouse control work, real-time monitoring and intelligent prediction based on soil temperature, soil moisture, humidity, and light achieved prediction error below 2.5%, showing that facility systems can support precise microclimate management, Wild-simulated cultivation, by contrast, relies on shade, breathable substrates, open ecological plantingl (Ding et al., 2018). This mode places greater emphasis on matching the original habitat and maintaining ecological interactions, including microbial and fungal symbioses (Liu et al., 2025b).

These different regulatory strategies lead to different biological and quality outcomes. Greenhouse cultivation can increase production stability, but it also changes growth patterns relative to wild plants and shifts the dominant environmental drivers of quality from rainfall and temperature toward altitude and sunlight. Wild-simulated systems generally reproduce an ecological environment closer to natural habitat, and in related Dendrobium comparisons they produced plant form more similar to wild material, higher active-ingredient content, and stronger overall quality performance than facility cultivation (Yi et al., 2021). Evidence in D. officinale itself also indicates that cultivation environment substantially affects metabolite accumulation and medicinal quality: wild material showed the highest polysaccharide content in one large analysis, 3~4 year-old plants outperformed younger plants, and stone or tree epiphytic environments produced distinct metabolite profiles and therapeutic differences relative to greenhouse conditions (Hou et al., 2025). Overall, facility cultivation is better suited to standardized, high-efficiency production, whereas wild-simulated cultivation better aligns with the ecological habits of D. officinale and often favors quality-oriented production, making comparative evaluation of the two modes essential for optimizing both yield and medicinal value.

3 Wild-Simulated Cultivation Analysis of Dendrobium officinale

3.1 Environmental selection and key technical characteristics

Wild-simulated cultivation of Dendrobium officinale is designed to preserve medicinal quality by reconstructing the plant’s original habitat as closely as possible rather than maximizing environmental control (Zhang et al., 2020; Yi et al., 2021). This logic fits the biological habit of D. officinale as an epiphytic orchid that naturally grows on rocks or tree trunks in well-aerated niches (Tan et al., 2023; Hou et al., 2025). Site selection therefore emphasizes forest or mountainous environments with appropriate shade, ventilation, and humidity, while avoiding prolonged coupling of high temperature and high humidity that favors southern blight (Liu et al., 2025b). In D. officinale, key quality-related ecological variables include maximum and minimum relative humidity, maximum temperature, sunshine duration, soil pH, and substrate nitrogen and phosphorus status, indicating that wild-simulated bases must be selected for both microclimate and nutrient conditions (Wang et al., 2025).

Technically, wild-simulated cultivation usually relies on tissue-culture seedlings transplanted onto stone or tree-attached substrates, with the aim of restoring natural epiphytic growth conditions while maintaining production feasibility (Figure 1) (Hou et al., 2025; Liu et al., 2025b). Reported field designs include lithophytic cultivation on vertical rock walls under natural light and tree epiphytic cultivation under 70~80% canopy shade or comparable artificial shading. Core technical steps commonly include base cleaning, disinfection, construction of breathable woody or bark-based media, mist or spray irrigation, water-fertilizer management, and ecological pest control, while some systems use biogas slurry, organic amendments, or interplanting for low-residue management. Current evidence also highlights the importance of integrating mycorrhizal or endophytic fungi, because fungal co-culture supports germination, seedling establishment, stress resistance, and quality stability in restoration-friendly epiphytic cultivation (Zhang et al., 2020; Wang et al., 2021).

Figure 1 The three growth environments of D. officinale (Adopted from Hou et al., 2025) Image caption: (A) Stone epiphytic culture environment in the wild; (B) Tree epiphytic culture environment in the wild; (C) Greenhouse culture environment (Adopted from Hou et al., 2025)

3.2 Growth performance and quality formation

Under wild-simulated conditions, D. officinale generally shows growth patterns closer to wild plants than those observed under greenhouse production (Lan et al., 2022). This mode does not always maximize biomass or total yield, but it better matches the species’ ecological habit and often improves structural and sensory characteristics associated with traditional high-quality material (Yi et al., 2021). Growth performance in such systems remains strongly constrained by water availability and climate stress, especially in karst forest environments where drought and high temperature can slow growth and reduce yield. For this reason, strain screening for drought adaptation and physiological resilience has become an important support technology for wild-simulated production (Luo et al., 2024).

The main strength of wild-simulated cultivation lies in quality formation. Studies in D. officinale show that wild stone-epiphytic material contains higher polysaccharide, flavonoid, and alkaloid levels than greenhouse material, and stone epiphytic stems can accumulate substantially more up-regulated metabolites, especially flavonoids, than tree-epiphytic or greenhouse stems. In one comparative study, stone-epiphytic stems also showed stronger protective effects in chronic atrophic gastritis cell models, linking metabolite differences to functional differences. Related evidence across Dendrobium species is consistent: wild-simulated cultivation often yields higher levels of polysaccharides, flavonoids, alkaloids, amino acids, or non-starch polysaccharides than greenhouse cultivation, even though some individual studies report higher total polysaccharides in greenhouse-grown samples, showing that quality differences depend on the compound measured and the cultivation context (Hu et al., 2024). Mechanistically, this likely reflects the combined effects of habitat-like stress, niche-specific light and water regimes, and richer microbial interactions, all of which promote secondary metabolite accumulation and alter biosynthetic gene expression (Zhang et al., 2020).

3.3 Advantages, limitations, and application value

Compared with facility cultivation, wild-simulated cultivation offers several clear advantages. It restores the wild habitat more faithfully, produces plant morphology closer to traditional medicinal standards, and often increases the content of major active constituents and overall medicinal quality. Semi-wild systems are also associated with lower planting density, greater resistance to pests and diseases, reduced chemical residues, and stronger ecological compatibility. At the industry level, this mode fits the transition from purely sheltered mass production toward diversified ecologically friendly cultivation and helps connect commercial production with biodiversity conservation (Cheng et al., 2019; Wang et al., 2021). It is therefore valuable not only for medicinal quality control, but also for sustainable branding of high-end medicinal, edible, and health products derived from D. officinale (Liu et al., 2025b).

Its limitations are equally clear. Wild-simulated cultivation usually has lower yield, slower growth, and higher labor dependence than facility cultivation, and its outcomes are more vulnerable to drought, abnormal temperature, and site heterogeneity (Luo et al., 2024). Quality is often better, but not uniformly so across all indicators; for example, some studies found greenhouse or lithophytic systems superior to tree-epiphytic systems for polysaccharide content, and greenhouse-grown D. huoshanense showed higher total polysaccharides than imitation wild plants in one dataset (Hu et al., 2024). These mixed findings indicate that wild-simulated cultivation is not simply a high-quality shortcut, but a mode whose value depends on correct site selection, suitable germplasm, fungal support, and targeted quality indicators (Lan et al., 2022). Overall, wild-simulated cultivation is best understood as a quality-oriented and conservation-compatible production pathway with strong application value for premium D. officinale, especially when combined with standardized seedlings, ecological regulation, and modern quality evaluation methods (Yang et al., 2026).

4 Facility Cultivation Mode of Dendrobium officinale

4.1 Environmental regulation and standardized production technologies

Facility cultivation of Dendrobium officinale is a production mode centered on artificial environmental control, standardized seedling use, and integrated cultivation management to achieve stable and large-scale supply (Cheng et al., 2019). In recent years, greenhouse cultivation has become one of the main artificial cultivation modes developed to relieve pressure on wild resources and meet expanding market demand (Yang et al., 2023). Its technical logic is to create a controllable microenvironment around this epiphytic orchid, because the accumulation of medicinal components is strongly affected by light, temperature, humidity, water, and nutrient conditions (Jia et al., 2022). Greenhouse systems therefore regulate shade, irrigation, ventilation, humidity, and substrate conditions more intensively than wild-simulated systems, so that plants grow under relatively suitable and less fluctuating conditions while disease risk is reduced as much as possible (Liu et al., 2025b).

Standardized production in facility cultivation begins with industrial tube seedlings and high-quality transplant material, because seedling quality directly affects survival, vigor, and later yield. Existing standards and technical procedures already provide guidance for cultivation, but national-level production standards are still incomplete, so further unification of germplasm, nursery, and production specifications remains necessary. Facility cultivation also supports precision regulation through monitored parameters such as soil or substrate temperature, moisture, air humidity, and light, and intelligent control models have been developed with prediction error below 2.5%, showing the feasibility of data-based environmental management (Ding et al., 2018). At the cultivation-operation level, standardized facility production usually includes seedling propagation, substrate optimization, disinfection, transplantation, shade management, water-fertilizer regulation, and eco-friendly pest control, with substrate, fertilization, and harvest timing all recognized as important determinants of final medicinal quality.

4.2 Yield formation and quality regulation

Under facility conditions, yield formation is shaped by the interaction of seedling quality, cultivation structure, environmental regulation, and growth duration. Greenhouse cultivation is widely adopted because it can provide a more stable production environment and generally higher biomass and stem yield than less protected systems (Yang et al., 2023). High-quality seedlings show higher survival, stronger growth vigor, and higher stem yield after transplantation, indicating that yield improvement begins at the nursery stage rather than only in field management. Growth duration also matters: dendrobine content increased with planting years in one cultivation study, but nutrient-accumulation comparisons under artificial-sheltered cultivation found the best harvest time in the third year in both southern and northern sites, indicating that the optimal harvest stage depends on the target quality trait rather than on biomass alone (Guo et al., 2021). Expanding facility cultivation northward further links yield to varietal adaptation, because low temperature is a major limitation in new production areas and cold-resistant strains can improve transplantation success, survival, and economic returns.

Quality regulation under facility cultivation depends on deliberate manipulation of environmental and nutritional signals. Light is one of the strongest regulators: moderate light intensity improved multifunctional traits, while red light promoted expression of a key polysaccharide-synthesis gene and also improved growth, biomass, and polysaccharide and alkaloid accumulation in greenhouse experiments (Wang et al., 2024). Light and potassium treatments significantly increased anthocyanin accumulation and shifted metabolite and transcript profiles toward flavonoid and phenylpropanoid biosynthesis, showing that facility quality control can act through coordinated metabolic regulation rather than simple stress avoidance (Jia et al., 2022). Temperature regime is likewise regulatable in protected production: a day-night temperature difference of 25/13 ℃ was more favorable than constant-temperature treatments for chlorophyll, polysaccharides, and total flavonoids in protocorm-like bodies, with corresponding changes in genes related to sugar and flavonol metabolism (Chen et al., 2024). Substrate and growth regulators also affect quality, as pine bark substrate favored flavonoid accumulation, and field application of 2,4-epibrassinolide increased stem and leaf polysaccharide-related sugars, with dried-stem polysaccharide rising by as much as 61% after 35 days in one study (Lu et al., 2025).

4.3 Advantages, challenges, and industrial application prospects

The main advantage of facility cultivation is its suitability for standardized, large-scale production. It has been a core driver of the transition from wild collection to massive commercial artificial-sheltered cultivation and has effectively alleviated the historical supply-demand imbalance of D. officinale. Facility production supports stable raw-material supply, scalable seedling propagation, expansion of cultivation areas, and the formation of complete industrial chains from cultivation to processing and health-product manufacture (Figure 2) (Cheng et al., 2019). It also offers practical residue-control advantages when managed well: one standardized comparison found no organophosphorus pesticide residues in growth-chamber cultivation, whereas residues were detected in bedstead production. These features make facility cultivation especially important for supplying medicinal, food, and health-product markets that require stable volume, traceability, and manageable production schedules.

Figure 2 The usable parts and forms of Dendrobium officinale (Adopted from Cheng et al., 2019) Image caption: (a) Stems; (b) Tiepi Fengdou; (c) Leaves; (d) Dry flowers (Adopted from Cheng et al., 2019)

Its challenges are equally clear. Evidence across comparative studies shows that artificial-sheltered or greenhouse cultivation can alter phenotype, metabolite composition, and sometimes medicinal efficacy relative to more natural cultivation environments, so higher controllability does not automatically mean higher medicinal quality (Jia et al., 2022; Yi et al., 2026). The industry also faces germplasm mixing, uneven quality and yield, incomplete national standards, and a still-low level of deep product development (Cheng et al., 2019). In addition, some comparative evidence suggests that greenhouse-grown material can be inferior to stone-epiphytic material for broad metabolite richness and some functional outcomes, even though greenhouse samples may equal or exceed other modes for specific indicators such as polysaccharides (Yang et al., 2023; Hou et al., 2025). Even with these limitations, facility cultivation has strong industrial prospects because D. officinale is now embedded in the expanding food-medicine homology sector, provincial standards for leaves and flowers are emerging, ISO-related standardization is advancing, and the genus already has broad economic value in medicinal, food, ornamental, and cosmetic applications. Overall, facility cultivation is best positioned as the scale and standardization platform of the D. officinale industry, while future progress depends on better varieties, tighter standards, lower chemical inputs, and more precise quality-oriented environmental regulation.

5 Comprehensive Comparison of Wild-Simulated and Facility Cultivation Modes

5.1 Differences in ecological environment and production management between the two modes

Wild-simulated cultivation and facility cultivation differ first in their basic ecological logic. Wild-simulated cultivation aims to restore the original habitat and site conditions of Dendrobium officinale as much as possible, typically through stone or tree epiphytic planting in forested or mountainous settings with more natural light, airflow, microbial communities, and environmental fluctuation (Zhang et al., 2020; Lan et al., 2022). Facility cultivation instead relies on greenhouse or other sheltered systems that create a controllable microenvironment through artificial shade, irrigation, ventilation, and substrate management. This ecological contrast matters because the main medicinal components of D. officinale are tightly linked to growing conditions, including relative humidity, maximum temperature, sunshine duration, soil pH, and substrate nitrogen and phosphorus status (Wang et al., 2025). Recent predictive work also suggests that greenhouse cultivation changes the environmental drivers of polysaccharide accumulation, shifting key influences from rainfall and temperature toward altitude and sunlight and moving high-quality production zones away from the pattern seen in wild habitats (Yang et al., 2026).

The two modes also differ substantially in production management. Wild-simulated systems usually emphasize ecological base selection, breathable epiphytic substrates, moderate shade, lower planting density, and the preservation of symbioses with endophytic or mycorrhizal fungi, because fungal interactions contribute to growth, stress resistance, and quality stability (Zhang et al., 2024; Liu et al., 2025b). Facility cultivation emphasizes standardized seedlings, intensive water-fertilizer regulation, substrate optimization, and real-time environmental monitoring, which makes production more uniform and easier to schedule at large scale. The two systems therefore differ not only in openness versus controllability, but also in biological regulation: wild-simulated cultivation uses niche matching and moderate stress to guide plant development, whereas facility cultivation uses technical intervention to reduce environmental variability and stabilize growth (Zhang et al., 2020). In practical terms, wild-simulated cultivation is closer to the ecological habit of an epiphytic orchid, while facility cultivation is closer to a standardized industrial production platform (Tan et al., 2023; Hou et al., 2025).

5.2 Comparative effects on yield, quality, and accumulation of active compounds

Across studies, facility cultivation tends to perform better for yield stability and production efficiency, while wild-simulated cultivation more often favors medicinal quality and the accumulation of diverse active compounds. Reviews of the industry consistently note that semi-wild systems usually have lower yields and higher labor costs, whereas greenhouse systems are used precisely because they can alleviate supply shortages and support stable large-scale output. Comparative work in Dendrobium huoshanense likewise found that greenhouse cultivation had higher productivity and was more suitable for daily functional-food or health-product use (Hu et al., 2024). Facility systems can also be optimized further through standardized seedling production, strain selection, and controlled additive or nutritional treatments, all of which improve biomass or transplant survival (Liu et al., 2025a). Even so, yield advantage does not consistently translate into superior medicinal quality, because greenhouse conditions often reshape growth patterns and metabolite allocation relative to more natural environments (Yang et al., 2026; Yi et al., 2026).

Across D. officinale and related Dendrobium species, the available evidence tends to favor, especially when multiple compound classes or functional outcomes are considered. Simulative habitat cultivation produced morphology closer to wild material and higher quality than facility cultivation in D. huoshanense (Yi et al., 2021), and wild-simulated material showed higher levels of polysaccharides, flavonoids, alkaloids, amino acids, and other nutritional constituents in several comparative studies. In D. officinale, stone-epiphytic material showed 58 up-regulated metabolites relative to tree-epiphytic and greenhouse material, including seven amino-acid derivatives and eighteen flavonoids, and it also showed stronger protective effects in a chronic atrophic gastritis cell model (Hou et al., 2025). Wild-simulated or epiphytic systems also produced higher non-starch polysaccharide ratios and stronger antioxidant activity than facility cultivation in D. catenatum. However, this pattern is not absolute: one D. huoshanense study found higher total polysaccharide content in greenhouse-grown samples (Hu et al., 2024), and one D. officinale comparison reported that greenhouse and lithophytic cultivation both exceeded living-tree epiphytic cultivation in polysaccharide content. The strongest conclusion is therefore that facility cultivation can perform well for selected indicators, especially bulk polysaccharide production, but wild-simulated cultivation more consistently improves composite quality, metabolite richness, and some bioactivity-related outcomes.

5.3 Comparison of economic benefits and industrial applicability

From an economic perspective, the two modes serve different market positions. Facility cultivation is more suitable for scale, standardization, and stable supply, which is why it has become a major foundation of the modern D. officinale industry and of the transition from wild collection to commercial cultivation. It supports expansion of planting areas, integration with seedling factories and processing chains, and the reliable supply of raw materials for pharmaceuticals, dietary supplements, foods, and related products (Liu et al., 2025a). Facility cultivation also fits precision agriculture and standardized production goals, especially as technical procedures, improved substrates, and environmental regulation systems continue to advance (Yang et al., 2026). For these reasons, facility cultivation has the broader industrial applicability in mass-market contexts, particularly where output consistency, traceability, and scalable processing matter most (Wang et al., 2025).

Wild-simulated cultivation has a different economic logic: it is less advantageous for maximum output, but often more advantageous for premium positioning, ecological value, and high-end medicinal use. One direct comparison in D. huoshanense reported that simulated habitat cultivation had high income, the lowest input-output ratio, and significant economic benefit overall. One study reported prices approximately 5~10 times higher than greenhouse products, even though greenhouse cultivation had higher yield (Hu et al., 2024). Wild-simulated systems also align better with conservation-compatible and ecologically friendly industry development, because they connect medicinal-material production with habitat restoration, biodiversity protection, and lower chemical-residue expectations (Cheng et al., 2019). Their limitations remain clear: they are more labor-intensive, more dependent on suitable sites and microclimates, and less suited to rapid volume expansion. Overall, facility cultivation is the main route for large-scale industrial supply, whereas wild-simulated cultivation is better suited to quality-oriented, high-value, and ecological segments of the D. officinale industry (Zhang et al., 2020).

6 Optimization and Future Development of Dendrobium officinale Cultivation Modes

6.1 Promoting integrated cultivation systems combining the advantages of wild-simulated and facility modes

The future direction of D. officinale cultivation is not a simple replacement of one mode by another, but the construction of integrated systems that combine the stability of facility cultivation with the quality advantages of wild-simulated cultivation. Earlier work had already identified bionic-facility cultivation, original ecological cultivation, and pot cultivation as parallel technical routes, indicating that hybridized mode design is a recognized development path in D. officinale production (Yuan et al., 2020). This integrated logic is biologically reasonable because D. officinale depends on strict environmental conditions, while its quality remains tightly linked to ecological factors such as humidity, temperature, sunshine duration, pH, and substrate nutrient status (Ding et al., 2018). At the same time, simulated habitat systems more closely reproduce the wild environment and often deliver better plant form, higher medicinal-component accumulation, and stronger overall quality performance in related Dendrobium comparisons (Yi et al., 2021).

An optimized integrated system should therefore use facility conditions mainly for seedling propagation, transplantation buffering, and early-stage growth stabilization, then guide plants toward bionic, epiphytic, or understory production environments during quality-formation stages (Hou et al., 2025). Such a system can be further strengthened by matching variety breeding, site selection, and co-culture with endophytic fungi, which recent synthesis identifies as a key route for efficient cultivatio. Wild-mimic integrated techniques already show that tissue-culture seedlings can be transplanted into breathable understory substrates with survival rates above 95%, while maintaining high effective-component content, low residue, and relatively convenient management. Under carbon-neutrality goals, this integration also has ecological significance, because simulative habitat cultivation in related Dendrobium systems produced far lower CO₂ emissions and global warming potential than facility cultivation, supporting the value of shifting at least part of production toward carbon-friendly hybrid systems (Tian et al., 2025).

6.2 Strengthening precision environmental regulation and green cultivation technologies

Precision environmental regulation should become the technical core of future facility and semi-facility cultivation, because the main medicinal components of D. officinale are strongly shaped by environmental variables rather than by cultivation mode label alone (Yuan et al., 2020). Greenhouse control research shows that soil temperature, soil moisture, air humidity, and light can be monitored and modeled for real-time regulation, with average prediction error below 2.5%, providing a workable basis for precision cultivation (Ding et al., 2018). More recent intelligent agriculture work goes further: an IoT edge-computing and digital-twin control system improved temperature-control precision to ±0.7℃, increased production by 23.6%, and reduced energy use by 42.6% across climates. Data-driven rule mining from greenhouse climate sensors also replicated about 80% of the climatic conditions associated with successful past cultivation, indicating that knowledge-based environmental replication can help maintain more consistent quality (Sun et al., 2018).

Future green cultivation should not pursue high inputs alone, because increased planting density and greater use of fertilizers, growth regulators, and pesticides in greenhouse systems can raise toxic and hazardous residues (Yuan et al., 2020). Recent industrial reviews therefore emphasize reducing chemical fertilizer and pesticide use, improving disease and pest management, and establishing economically and environmentally sustainable production systems. Practical green technologies already supported in the literature include pine-bark or woody breathable substrates, organic nutrient inputs, understory shading, mist irrigation, and ecological pest-control designs, as well as mycorrhizal or endophytic-fungal application to improve drought resistance, disease resistance, and quality stability (Zhang et al., 2024). In addition, precision cultivation should shift from post-harvest correction to pre-plantation zoning, because machine-learning evidence shows that facility agriculture changes the key environmental drivers of polysaccharide accumulation and shifts high-quality production areas geographically.

6.3 Improving quality evaluation systems and standardized production systems

A major bottleneck in future development is that current quality evaluation still relies too heavily on polysaccharide content alone. Multiple studies state that polysaccharides are the main or even sole pharmacopoeial quality marker now in use (Tan et al., 2023), but metabolomics evidence shows that this standard is incomplete because secondary-metabolite patterns can move in the opposite direction from polysaccharide rankings across regions and cultivation environments (He et al., 2022). Recent multidimensional work strengthens this point by identifying 1 929 metabolites in stems from different cultivation environments and showing that stone-epiphytic samples had 58 up-regulated metabolites, especially flavonoids, along with stronger cell-level protective effects. Future quality evaluation should therefore move toward multi-index systems that jointly consider polysaccharides, flavonoids, alkaloids, polyphenols, oligosaccharide markers, and bioactivity-linked fingerprints (Wong et al., 2019).

Analytical technology for this transition is already available. Near-infrared spectroscopy combined with chemometrics can rapidly predict polysaccharides, polyphenols, total flavonoids, and total alkaloids and can identify geographical origin with very high accuracy (Yang et al., 2022). Oligosaccharide-marker methods and spectrum-effect approaches also provide rapid, validated, and functionally meaningful routes for polysaccharide-related quality control (Wong et al., 2019). Standardized production must advance in parallel, because the mixing of germplasm has already caused major variation in yield and quality, while national production standards are still lacking despite existing technical procedures, provincial food standards, and ongoing ISO alignment. Accordingly, future development should build a full-chain standardized system covering germplasm identification, seedling production, cultivation-mode matching, harvest timing, processing, and rapid quality verification, so that D. officinale can develop toward high-quality, green, and industrially consistent production (Gu et al., 2017; Hou et al., 2025).

7 Conclusion of Cultivation Modes

Wild-simulated cultivation and facility cultivation represent the two major production modes of Dendrobium officinale in current industrial development. Wild-simulated cultivation reconstructs the natural habitat and epiphytic environment of D. officinale through forest, rock, or tree-attached cultivation, allowing plants to grow under ecological conditions closer to the wild state. This mode promotes secondary metabolism through environmental adaptation, microbial interactions, and moderate ecological stress, and generally contributes to the formation of wild-like morphological characteristics and improved comprehensive quality. Facility cultivation, in contrast, relies on greenhouse-based environmental regulation, standardized seedlings, and precise water-fertilizer management to achieve stable and large-scale production. It has clear advantages in yield stability, production efficiency, and industrial supply capacity. However, artificial environments may alter plant metabolic characteristics and quality formation processes, and further optimization of quality regulation technologies is still required.

The selection of cultivation mode should be determined according to specific production objectives rather than based on a single evaluation criterion. For large-scale raw material supply, standardized production, and integration with pharmaceutical, food, and health-product industries, facility cultivation is more suitable due to its stable yield, standardized management, and high production efficiency. In contrast, wild-simulated cultivation has greater potential for premium medicinal materials, ecological branding, and high-value products, owing to its advantages in active compound accumulation and ecological characteristics. However, neither mode has absolute superiority, as quality formation is influenced by cultivation environment, evaluation indicators, and plant developmental stage. Therefore, differentiated development strategies should be adopted: facility cultivation should focus on large-scale, standardized, and functional-product supply, whereas wild-simulated cultivation should target quality-oriented, high-value, and ecologically distinctive products.

Future development of the D. officinale industry should emphasize the integration of advantages from both cultivation modes rather than expanding either system independently. A composite production strategy, such as “facility-based seedling propagation combined with ecological cultivation for quality improvement,” can effectively combine production efficiency with medicinal quality enhancement. Meanwhile, precision environmental regulation, green cultivation technologies, and intelligent management should be further applied to improve production stability and quality consistency. In addition, quality evaluation systems should move beyond reliance on a single polysaccharide indicator and develop comprehensive evaluation frameworks incorporating polysaccharides, flavonoids, alkaloids, metabolomic characteristics, and bioactivity-related parameters. By improving germplasm management, production standards, and quality traceability systems, the D. officinale industry can achieve sustainable development characterized by high quality, high efficiency, and ecological compatibility.

Conflict of Interest Disclosure

The author affirms that this research was conducted without any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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