Analyzing the Impact of Greenhouse Planting Strategy and Plant Architecture on Tomato Plant Physiology and Estimated Dry Matter

Abstract

Determine the level of significance of planting strategy and plant architecture and how they affect plant physiology and dry matter accumulation within greenhouses is essential to actual greenhouse plant management and breeding. We thus analyzed four planting strategies (plant spacing, furrow distance, row orientation, planting pattern) and eight different plant architectural traits (internode length, leaf azimuth angle, leaf elevation angle, leaf length, leaflet curve, leaflet elevation, leaflet number/area ratio, leaflet length/width ratio) with the same plant leaf area using a formerly developed functional–structural model for a Chinese Liaoshen-solar greenhouse and tomato plant, which used to simulate the plant physiology of light interception, temperature, stomatal conductance, photosynthesis, and dry matter. Our study led to the conclusion that the planting strategies have a more significant impact overall on plant radiation, temperature, photosynthesis, and dry matter compared to plant architecture changes. According to our findings, increasing the plant spacing will have the most significant impact to increase light interception. E–W orientation has better total light interception but yet weaker light uniformity. Changes in planting patterns have limited influence on the overall canopy physiology. Increasing the plant leaflet area by leaflet N/A ratio from what we could observe for a rose the total dry matter by 6.6%, which is significantly better than all the other plant architecture traits. An ideal tomato plant architecture which combined all the above optimal architectural traits was also designed to provide guidance on phenotypic traits selection of breeding process. The combined analysis approach described herein established the causal relationship between investigated traits, which could directly apply to provide management and breeding insights on other plant species with different solar greenhouse structures.

Optimized Tomato Production in Chinese Solar Greenhouses: The Impact of an East–West Orientation and Wide Row Spacing

“…The experiment showed that south-to-north light interception decreased and more plant variation in east-west cultivation (EW-1.8 m) than in north-south cultivation (NS-1.4 m and NS-1.8 m) (Figure 7) and that the highest population light interception was in EW-1.8m treatment rather than in the NS-1.4m and NS-1.8m treatments (Figure 8). Zhang et al [25] suggested that light interception in the east-west-oriented tomato population was higher than that in the north-south-oriented population but that the light uniformity in the population was weaker, which was similar to our results. Van der Meer et al [24] proposed that in east-west-oriented cultivation, since most of the light was intercepted by the leaves in the middle part of the tomato plant canopy, the pruning of these leaves could increase the light uniformity within the population by increasing the light penetration.…”

“…Van der Meer et al [24] analyzed the impact of planting orientation on tomatoes in a Venlo greenhouse and found that east-west row planting affected light interception uniformity but not photosynthesis. Zhang et al [25] discussed the effects of planting density and row orientation on tomatoes grown in solar greenhouses and determined that plant spacing had the highest impact on light interception, with east-west planting enhancing population light interception. Sarlikioti et al [26] concluded that higher solar altitude angles in summer resulted in light being more perpendicular to the plant canopy, thus leading to increased light penetration and reduced interception.…”

Estimating the Light Interception and Photosynthesis of Greenhouse-Cultivated Tomato Crops under Different Canopy Configurations

“…A comprehensive analysis of major trends in the evolution of planting strategies suitable for Chinese solar greenhouses was conducted by [37]. Despite this, a planting strategy specifically optimized for the cultivation conditions of Chinese solar greenhouses in the northern region remains unidentified.…”

Contributions of leaf distribution and leaf functions to photosynthesis and water-use efficiency from leaf to canopy in apple: A comparison of interstocks and cultivars

“…Apple (Malus × domestica) is suitable for exploring scionrootstock interactions owing to its high economic value, ease of cloning, diverse genetic resources, successful application of interstocks and rootstocks, and development of 3D architecture-based models (Costes et al, 2008;Yang et al, 2021). Numerous 3D architecture-based plant models have been established to study complex relationships among tree architecture, canopy microclimate, transpiration, and carbon assimilation and allocation to screen the relative contribution of architectural and leaf functional traits to select 'optimized' combinations by conducting virtual experiments (Chen et al, 2014;Picheny et al, 2017;Zhu et al, 2019;Zhang et al, 2022b). However, rule-based plant architecture simulation is time-consuming and recreation of the large tree structure in the field is difficult (Zhu et al, 2019).…”