At present, the fruit picking in most countries still largely relies on manual operation. Manual fruit picking can protect the fruits from damage during the operation process. However, it is time-consuming and labor-intensive, and poses a potential safety risk to the workers while working at heights not reachable. Therefore, a variety of fruit picking machines and platforms have been developed ...

Physiological disorders are abnormalities in fruit color or appearance that are abiotic in origin. These abnormalities are often confused with damage from pathogens or insects (biotic damage). Physiological disorders are distinguished from deficiencies of a single nutrient, and physical, chemical or herbicide injury. Causes of physiological disorders include genetic susceptibility, environmenta...

Calcium (Ca) uptake into fruit and leaves is dependent on xylemic water movement, and hence presumably driven by transpiration and growth. High leaf transpiration is thought to restrict Ca movement to low-transpiring tomato fruit, which may increase fruit susceptibility to the Ca-deficiency disorder, blossom end rot (BER). The objective of this study was to analyse the effect of reduced leaf tr...

In this paper the nature of root-to-shoot signals in plants growing in drying soil is considered in the context of their commercial exploitation in tomato (Lycopersicon esculentum L.) and other crops. Recent findings are presented on the effects of partial root drying (PRD) in the production of a glasshouse tomato crop. These findings show how an understanding of both root-to-shoot signalling m...

Pathogen aggressiveness on the host was studied as one of the influencing factors in the variability of the efficiency of biocontrol by Pantoea agglomerans. The effect of the relative dose of the pathogen and biocontrol agent (BCA) on efficacy of biocontrol was analyzed in six postharvest pathogens (Rhizopus stolonifer, Botrytis cinerea, Penicillium expansum, Monilinia laxa, Penicillium digitat...

In the mild and humid climate of northwestern Europe, fungal pre-harvest rots are a major factor limiting the production of soft-fruits such as strawberries and raspberries. By far the most important fungal disease is grey mould caused by Botrytis cinerea Pers.:Fr., now known to be an aggregate of at least two distinct species (Fournier et al., 2005; Giraud et al., 1999). Primary infections are...

Diseases in fruit cause devastating problem in economic losses and production in agricultural industry worldwide. In this paper, an adaptive approach for the identification of fruit diseases is proposed and experimentally validated. The image processing based proposed approach is composed of the following main steps; in the first step K-Means clustering technique is used for the defect segmenta...

Forest trees are considered important in ameliorating climate change through removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, stabilizing water catchments and for timber production. Wood decay fungi among most biotic factors ecosystems, infecting valuable landscaping causing an economic loss or preeminent recyclers of wood. In a survey forest Alamdardeh forest, northern Iran, fungal fruit bodies we...