Abstract
Background and AimsMango (Mangifera indica L.) is the fifth most widely produced fruit in the world. Its cultivation, mainly in tropical and sub-tropical regions, raises a number of issues such as the irregular fruit production across years, phenological asynchronisms that lead to long periods of pest and disease susceptibility, and the heterogeneity of fruit quality and maturity at harvest. To address these issues, we developed an integrative functional–structural plant model that synthesizes knowledge about the vegetative and reproductive development of the mango tree and opens up the possible simulation of cultivation practices.MethodsWe designed a model of architectural development in order to precisely characterize the intricate developmental processes of the mango tree. The appearance of botanical entities was decomposed into elementary stochastic events describing occurrence, intensity and timing of development. These events were determined by structural (position and fate of botanical entities) and temporal (appearance dates) factors. Daily growth and development of growth units and inflorescences were modelled using empirical distributions and thermal time. Fruit growth was determined using an ecophysiological model that simulated carbon- and water-related processes at the fruiting branch scale.Key ResultsThe model simulates the dynamics of the population of growth units, inflorescences and fruits at the tree scale during a growing cycle. Modelling the effects of structural and temporal factors makes it possible to simulate satisfactorily the complex interplays between vegetative and reproductive development. The model allowed the characterization of the susceptibility of mango tree to pests and the investigatation of the influence of tree architecture on fruit growth.ConclusionsThis integrative functional–structural model simulates mango tree vegetative and reproductive development over successive growing cycles, allowing a precise characterization of tree phenology and fruit growth and production. The next step is to integrate the effects of cultivation practices, such as pruning, into the model.
Highlights
Improving the management of fruit trees implies a better knowledge of the impact of tree architecture on vegetative development and reproduction (Lauri, 2002; Costes et al, 2006; Dambreville et al, 2013a)
Our objective was to develop an integrative functional–structural plant model (FSPM) of mango tree development and fruit production based on current knowledge about vegetative and reproductive growth and development in order to: (1) demonstrate that an FSPM can be used to formalize the complex architectural development of evergreen tropical trees in terms of structure and phenology; (2) show that the introduction in the model of endogenous structural and temporal factors modulating tree architecture development allows the simulation of complex interactions between vegetative and reproductive growth; and (3) provide a tree growth and fruit production model representing the first step toward a mango crop model that would be used to design cultivation practices to alleviate agronomic issues
At the growth units (GUs) scale, it is formalized as a stochastic automaton that decomposes the vegetative and reproductive development of the architecture into elementary processes modelled with probabilities estimated from actual trees using generalized linear models (GLMs)
Summary
Improving the management of fruit trees implies a better knowledge of the impact of tree architecture on vegetative development and reproduction (Lauri, 2002; Costes et al, 2006; Dambreville et al, 2013a). Plant architectural development can be formalized using the functional–structural plant model (FSPM) approach (Sievänen et al, 2014) It has been successfully applied on fruit trees (Allen et al, 2005; Lescourret et al, 2011), forest trees (Letort et al, 2008; Sievänen et al, 2008), perennial grasses (Verdenal et al, 2008) and annuals (Fournier and Andrieu, 1999; Buck-Sorlin et al, 2008; Kahlen and Stützel, 2011; Barillot et al, 2016; Louarn and Faverjon, 2018). It provides an easy means to generate a large number of similar trees (Han et al, 2017), limiting the tedious work of data acquisition (Sinoquet et al, 1997) despite the development of semi-automatic acquisition systems for plant geometry (Xu et al., by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited
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