Non-Invasive Probing of Winter Dormancy via Time-Frequency Analysis of Induced Chlorophyll Fluorescence in Deciduous Plants as Exemplified by Apple (Malus × domestica Borkh.)статья
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Аннотация:Dormancy is a physiological state that confers winter hardiness to and orchestrates phenologicalphase progression in temperate perennial plants. Weather fluctuations caused by climatechange increasingly disturb dormancy onset and release in plants including tree crops, causing aberrantgrowth, flowering and fruiting. Research in this field suffers from the lack of affordable noninvasivemethods for online dormancy monitoring. We propose an automatic framework for lowcost,long-term, scalable dormancy studies in deciduous plants. It is based on continuous sensing ofthe photosynthetic activity of shoots via pulse-amplitude-modulated chlorophyll fluorescence sensorsconnected remotely to a data processing system. The resulting high-resolution time series ofJIP-test parameters indicative of the responsiveness of the photosynthetic apparatus to environmentalstimuli were subjected to frequency-domain analysis. The proposed approach overcomes thevariance coming from diurnal changes of insolation and provides hints on the depth of dormancy.Our approach was validated over three seasons in an apple (Malus × domestica Borkh.) orchard bycollating the non-invasive estimations with the results of traditional methods (growing of the cuttingsobtained from the trees at different phases of dormancy) and the output of chilling requirementmodels. We discuss the advantages of the proposed monitoring framework such as promptdetection of frost damage along with its potential limitations.