EMPIRICAL MODELS FOR TOMATO CROP USING TEMPERATURE AND PHOTOSYNTHETICALLY ACTIVE RADIATION

Mathematical mechanistic models for tomato crop growth, based on photosynthesis, have been used to predict fruit yield, biomass or to simulate the effect of salinity on fruit yield.
However, simple empirical models can be useful to estimate yield and biomass.
These models can be applied with only temperature data.
Four sets of experimental data, three from Almería, Spain and one from Chapingo, Mexico, were used to obtain parameters of empirical equations.
The experiments were carried out in soilless culture using rockwool and volcanic rock as substrate.
Temperature was transformed to heat units to get correlation with fruit yield and total biomass, several polynomial equations were obtained and have shown a determination coefficient >0.70 (R² from 0.90 to 0.99 for the most of them). Photosynthetically active radiation was used to estimate light use efficiency on total biomass and to obtain empirical models.

International Symposium on High Technology for Greenhouse Systems: GreenSys2009

A. Ramírez-Arias, J. Pineda-Pineda, F. Rodríguez-Díaz, M. Berenguel-Soria

greenhouse crop, tomato model

https://doi.org/10.17660/ActaHortic.2011.893.84