Rainy-season guava (Psidium guajava L.) production in subtropical India is frequently undermined by overcrowded canopies, inconsistent hormonal management, and intense fruit fly (Bactrocera dorsalis) pressure. A 2-year, three-factor factorial experiment (season 1: 2022–2023; season 2: 2023–2024) was conducted at Lovely Professional University, Phagwara, Punjab (31°N, 75.76°E; elevation 240 m), using a randomized complete block design (RCBD) with three replications. The treatments comprised: pruning intensity (A1 = 10-cm shoot-tip removal; A2 = 20 cm), plant growth regulators (B1 = naphthalene acetic acid [NAA] 10 ppm; B2 = NAA 20 ppm; B3 = gibberellic acid (GA3) 25 ppm; B4 = GA3 50 ppm, applied at full bloom and initial fruit set), and fruit bagging (C1 = muslin cloth; C2 = non-woven polypropylene; C3 = unbagged control). Pruning at 20 cm significantly advanced first flowering (66.28 days), increased fruit set (82.57
Pomegranate (Punica granatum L.) is an ancient, widely adapted fruit crop known for its medicinal properties and economic importance. It is a light loving plant that produces excessive suckers during summer season, leading to dense canopy and intense shading inside the canopy, which ultimately results in poor yield and fruit quality. To address this problem, a study was conducted to evaluate the influence of different summer pruning intensities and timings on vegetative growth, yield and fruit quality of pomegranate cv. Bhagwa. In this experiment, pruning was done during the second fortnight of May, June and July with five pruning intensities, viz., ¼ heading back (T1), 1/3 heading back (T2), ½ heading back (T3), 2/3 heading back (T4) and unpruned control (T5). The summer pruning performed during second fortnight of May recorded the highest percent increase in vegetative growth characters, fruit yield, fruit weight, fruit size, TSS, TSS/Acid ratio, total sugars, anthocyanin content, phenolic content, ascorbic acid, aril content and juice content. In term of pruning intensities, severest pruning intensities recorded the highest percent increase in vegetative growth. The ½ heading back treatment resulted in the highest fruit yield, fruit weight, fruit size, TSS, TSS/Acid ratio, total sugars, anthocyanin content, ascorbic acid, aril content and juice content. Although summer pruning is not a common practice in pomegranate, our findings indicate that ½ heading back treatment and early season pruning enhances fruit yield and fruit quality.
This study examined whether arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) inoculation could improve mineral nutrition and shape plant architecture in ‘GF 677’ and ‘Garnem’ peach rootstocks grown in calcareous field soils, where limited nutrient availability often constrains early growth. AMF inoculation increased root colonization in both genotypes, from 61.04 to 97.09
Drought is one of the most critical constraints threatening the sustainability of apple production, particularly in semi-arid regions. Understanding producers’ perceptions and responses to drought and irrigation challenges is essential for developing effective adaptation strategies. This study was conducted in the Eğirdir and Gelendost districts of Isparta province, Türkiye. Primary data were collected through face-to-face surveys with 182 apple producers in 2025. Producer perceptions were evaluated using strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) analysis and further integrated into a Strategic Orientation-Response (SOR) matrix to determine strategic priorities. Quantitative data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and reliability tests, while qualitative data were examined through thematic analysis. The results show that producers have a certain level of adaptive capacity based on their knowledge and experience; however, this capacity is limited by inadequate irrigation infrastructure and insufficient drought planning. SWOT findings indicate that weaknesses are perceived more strongly than strengths, particularly regarding irrigation infrastructure and water access. The SOR matrix reveals that strategic priorities are mainly concentrated in the Weaknesses × Opportunities and Weaknesses × Threats dimensions. The sustainability of apple production under drought conditions depends largely on addressing structural and knowledge-based weaknesses through targeted technical and institutional interventions.
Chinese hickory (Carya cathayensis) is an important woody oil crop and a source of non-wood forest products in China. In natural orchards, reliable instance-level maturity recognition supports harvest timing, planning, and fruit-level target selection. Adjacent stages may differ only in subtle pericarp color, surface patches, roughness, and cracking. We propose Cross-stage Recalibrated Maturity-Aware Detector (CRMA-Det), an end-to-end visual perception model based on real-time detection transformer (RT-DETR)-R18VD for fruit localization and four-stage ordinal maturity detection (M0–M3). It combines cross-stage partial reconstruction of PResNet Stages 3 and 4 (CSP-PResNet-S34), mean-preserving efficient channel attention at P4 (MP-ECA-P4), and cumulative ordinal auxiliary supervision. Together, these components retain weak cues, recalibrate maturity-relevant channels, and model stage order during training. We re-annotated 1661 valid images from the published CaryaData orchard corpus. Across three independent runs with λ_ord=0.800 , CRMA-Det achieved mean test precision of 0.783, recall of 0.827, F1 score of 0.804, mAP50 of 0.868, and mAP50:95 of 0.800. It reached 95.160 model-only frames per second (FPS) under a fixed-shape CUDA Graph protocol. Against RT-DETR-R18VD, it improved precision, recall, F1, mAP50, and mAP50:95 by 2.7, 4.6, 3.8, 2.3, and 2.0 percentage points, respectively, while reducing parameter count by 2.86
