article · Horticulturae
Adequate winter chilling is essential for successful dormancy release, flowering, and overall productivity in deciduous temperate fruit trees. In tropical and subtropical regions characterised by warm winters, climate change increasingly leads to winter chill deficits, which could soon become a critical limiting factor for commercial fruit cultivation. Adapting to these conditions requires a thorough understanding of the physiological mechanisms connecting temperature and dormancy, alongside the evaluation of practical management strategies. Key intervention pathways include applying chemical and organic dormancy-breaking compounds, designing predictive models to forecast chilling accumulation and dormancy release, and breeding new, climate-smart cultivars with lower chilling requirements. These combined measures offer potential solutions to maintain temperate fruit tree production under warming climate scenarios.
Rising temperatures disrupt the cold periods temperate fruit trees need to bloom and produce fruit reliably. Addressing chill deficits is critical for protecting fruit yields and farmer livelihoods in warmer cultivation areas. Understanding dormancy-breaking treatments and predictive tools helps growers and agricultural planners adapt orchards to changing climatic conditions.
The findings point to opportunities for fruit growers, agrochemical developers, and plant breeding programmes. Practical applications include formulated organic dormancy-breaking compounds, decision-support forecasting software for orchard management, and new low-chill cultivars. While forecasting models and conventional chemical treatments are currently in applied use, the discovery of novel organic agents and the breeding of climate-smart cultivars represent early- to mid-stage development pathways.
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Adequate chill is of great importance for successful production of deciduous fruit trees. However, temperate fruit trees grown under tropical and subtropical regions may face insufficient winter chill, which has a crucial role in dormancy and productivity. The objective of this review is to discuss the challenges for dormancy and chilling requirements of temperate fruit trees, especially in warm winter regions, under climate change conditions. After defining climate change and dormancy, the effects of climate change on various parameters of temperate fruit trees are described. Then, dormancy breaking chemicals and organic compounds, as well as some aspects of the mechanism of dormancy breaking, are demonstrated. After this, the relationships between dormancy and chilling requirements are delineated and challenging aspects of chilling requirements in climate change conditions and in warm winter environments are demonstrated. Experts have sought to develop models for estimating chilling requirements and dormancy breaking in order to improve the adaption of temperate fruit trees under tropical and subtropical environments. Some of these models and their uses are described in the final section of this review. In conclusion, global warming has led to chill deficit during winter, which may become a limiting factor in the near future for the growth of temperate fruit trees in the tropics and subtropics. With the increasing rate of climate change, improvements in some managing tools (e.g., discovering new, more effective dormancy breaking organic compounds; breeding new, climate-smart cultivars in order to solve problems associated with dormancy and chilling requirements; and improving dormancy and chilling forecasting models) have the potential to solve the challenges of dormancy and chilling requirements for temperate fruit tree production in warm winter fruit tree growing regions.
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DOI: 10.3390/horticulturae7040086
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