Background. Grapevine leafroll disease is one of the most widespread viral diseases in vineyards, affecting nearly all grape and wine regions in the world. Infection causes yield losses, ripening delays, and alters fruit chemistry, including lowering soluble solids and increasing titratable acidity. The viruses associated with leafroll disease are transmitted through propagation of infected mat...

More than 100 years ago a grapevine disease of unknown etiology was recognized in France and California, where it was called “folletage” (Ravaz, 1898) and “sunstroke” respectively (Anonymous, 1895). In both cases the disorder was considered to be due to a physiological condition resulting from what was called “abrupt changes in the bottom water level.” Research on the pathological nature of the...

We present a new methodology for selecting a Bayesian network for continuous data outside the widely used class of multivariate normal distributions. The use of bivariate copula densities to model connections between pairs of nodes in the network brings in flexibility in the choice of the distribution. Cand D-vines play a central role in dealing with the high-dimensional aspect of the data, due...

Environmental variance components were estimated for berry ripening time (BRT), berry weight (BW), soluble solids concentration (SSC), titratable acidity (TA), and deformation at the ®rst major peak (DFP) and maximum force (MF) in penetration tests of berry ̄esh in grapes (Vitis vinifera L. and V. labruscana Bailey). The variance among berries within clusters was largest among environmental var...

During the last two decades the advent of fast computers has made Bayesian inference based on Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods very popular in many fields of science. These Bayesian methods are good alternatives to traditional maximum likelihood (ML) methods since they often can estimate complicated statistical models for which a ML approach fails. In this paper we review available MCMC ...

Whole-plant hydraulic conductance, shoot growth, and leaf photosynthetic properties were measured on kiwifruit vines with four clonal rootstocks to examine the relationship between plant hydraulic conductance and leaf stomatal conductance (gs) and to test the hypothesis that reduced hydraulic conductance can provide an explanation for reductions in plant vigour caused by rootstocks. The rootsto...