Aportes Científicos en El Cultivo De Heliconias en México

Abstract

<p><strong>Background: </strong>Heliconias are commercially important flowers due to its abundance of shapes, sizes, and colors. In Mexico, however, this ornamental crop is not considered in the statistical yearbook of agricultural production. In addition, there is no research regarding the context of tropical floriculture. <strong>Objective:</strong> To explore all scientific contributions related to the cultivation of heliconias. <strong>Methodology: </strong>A bibliographic search was conducted in Redalyc, SciELO, Scopus and Google Scholar with the key word “heliconia.” After cleansing the database of similar results, we generated a final compilation of 42 papers, which were then subject to an analysis of textual content by using Nvivo 12 Plus software to identify the contributions by means of the following categories of analysis: Production, post-harvesting, and commercialization. The species of heliconias were also identified. <strong>Results:</strong> The content analysis showed that 73.71% of all scientific contributions correspond to the production category, 12.5 % to post-harvesting, and 13.88% to commercialization. For each category, different topics which guide the contributions were identified. We found 43 species of heliconias that were used for research purposes in the three categories of analysis. <strong>Implications:</strong> The analysis was limited only to scientific contributions explored. An analysis that considered other sources of information could have strengthened this analytical exercise. <strong>Conclusion:</strong> The scientific contributions regarding the cultivation of heliconias are mainly oriented to the production category, which demonstrates that the focus is on the improvement of the production process. On the contrary, the contributions on post-harvesting and commercialization are incipient; therefore, it is important to address these topics in future research. </p>