Researches
Esteban Blanco, Juan Delgado and Andrés G. Castillo A.
Date
July, 2020
Manejo orientado por la fenología: una herramienta útil para el manejo de cítricos en el trópico.
Tropical agro-productive systems are challenged by several factors such as plant pests and diseases, heavy rain
intensity, high humidity, steady high temperatures, among others. Climate change is triggering most of these stress factors,
making them more extreme and frequent.
One of the most affected abiotic factors is rainfall distribution and intensity. Field crops are exposed to these environmental changes where most of the management practices (soil preparation, sowing, fertilizer application, harvest, etc.) are established according to the rainfall patterns (“hydroperiodic”). Plant phenology monitoring stands as a tool to adjust the timing of cultural practices and xenobiotic spraying, instead of chronological programmed tasks.
Citrus has been a model crop for the application of this approach in Costa Rica. Phenological data of sweet orange (Citrus sinensis L. Osbeck cv: Valencia) grafted onto Swingle citrumelo (C. paradisi x Poncirus trifoliata) or Flying Dragon (Poncirus trifoliata L. Raft cv. Monstruosa) were annotated from December 2015 to October 2018, using a semiquantitative estimation for each phenological phases (BBCH) based on Fournier (1974). Phenograms were obtained and some differences between rootstocks were evidenced. The implications of tree phenology and weather information (obtained from a meteorological station in situ) on the dynamics of pests and diseases are described. Issues regarding large scale data acquisition and application for the grower are mentioned. To overcome this difficulty, the development of a smartphone application is proposed, where georeferenced sampling points are summarized by plot or farm (depending on crop management preferences) and a statistical report is emitted automatically for the grower regarding crop phenological event happening in the field. Being plants the primary connection into the agroecosystem, biotic stress agents can be predicted.
The technological revolution has dabbled into agriculture for the last two decades and this kind of application are being developed for extensive crops in other latitudes, but tropical crops are far behind. The aim is to provide more tools to achieve what we call ̈Phenology Driven Management (PDM) ̈.
One of the most affected abiotic factors is rainfall distribution and intensity. Field crops are exposed to these environmental changes where most of the management practices (soil preparation, sowing, fertilizer application, harvest, etc.) are established according to the rainfall patterns (“hydroperiodic”). Plant phenology monitoring stands as a tool to adjust the timing of cultural practices and xenobiotic spraying, instead of chronological programmed tasks.
Citrus has been a model crop for the application of this approach in Costa Rica. Phenological data of sweet orange (Citrus sinensis L. Osbeck cv: Valencia) grafted onto Swingle citrumelo (C. paradisi x Poncirus trifoliata) or Flying Dragon (Poncirus trifoliata L. Raft cv. Monstruosa) were annotated from December 2015 to October 2018, using a semiquantitative estimation for each phenological phases (BBCH) based on Fournier (1974). Phenograms were obtained and some differences between rootstocks were evidenced. The implications of tree phenology and weather information (obtained from a meteorological station in situ) on the dynamics of pests and diseases are described. Issues regarding large scale data acquisition and application for the grower are mentioned. To overcome this difficulty, the development of a smartphone application is proposed, where georeferenced sampling points are summarized by plot or farm (depending on crop management preferences) and a statistical report is emitted automatically for the grower regarding crop phenological event happening in the field. Being plants the primary connection into the agroecosystem, biotic stress agents can be predicted.
The technological revolution has dabbled into agriculture for the last two decades and this kind of application are being developed for extensive crops in other latitudes, but tropical crops are far behind. The aim is to provide more tools to achieve what we call ̈Phenology Driven Management (PDM) ̈.
