Production Practices and Quality Assessment of Food Crops. Vol. 1

Modelling Fruit Quality 67
Figure 8. WASIF model: observed (dots) and simulated (lines) data for mean fruit growth in two
well irrigated (I) and two stressed (S) trees of ‘Dixired’ peach cultivar.
In conclusion, this type of model make it possible to manage irrigation day
after day according to the information obtained by a bioindicator. It can be applied
to species with fleshy fruits having a high transpiration, whereas the fruit growth
of species with a low transpiration such as the tomato would probably be better
simulated by ‘resistance models’ where water import into the fruit is mainly controlled
by the resistances along the transfer pathway which depend on the fruit radius
(Bussières, 1994).
Figure 9. Simulated fruit mass at harvest with WASIF for MDS/MDSo ranging from 1 to 8 (A), and
simulated growth curves according to the period of stress (B). In (1) MDS/MDSo = 1 for the first
fifteen days and 2 for the following days, in (2) the periods are in reverse order. The bold line represents
the fruit under reference conditions.