Influence of Climate Change on Metabolism and Biological Characteristics in Perennial Woody Fruit Crops in the Mediterranean Environment

Abstract

The changes in the state of the climate have a high impact on perennial fruit crops thus threatening food availability. Indeed, climatic factors affect several plant aspects, such as phenological stages, physiological processes, disease-pest frequency, yield, and qualitative composition of the plant tissues and derived products. To mitigate the effects of climatic parameters variability, plants implement several strategies of defense, by changing phenological trends, altering physiology, increasing carbon sequestration, and metabolites synthesis. This review was divided into two sections. The first provides data on climate change in the last years and a general consideration on their impact, mitigation, and resilience in the production of food crops. The second section reviews the consequences of climate change on the industry of two woody fruit crops models (evergreen and deciduous trees). The research focused on, citrus, olive, and loquat as evergreen trees examples; while grape, apple, pear, cherry, apricot, almond, peach, kiwi, fig, and persimmon as deciduous species. Perennial fruit crops originated by a complex of decisions valuable in a long period and involving economic and technical problems that farmers may quickly change in the case of annual crops. However, the low flexibility of woody crops is balanced by resilience in the long-life cycle.

Exploring innovation adoption behavior for sustainable development of Mediterranean tree crops

“…They represent an important reality for Italy in the trade balance with foreign countries and for the economies of many parts of the country (Biasi et al, 2012;Sgroi et al, 2015). Although Italian fruit-growing cannot be defined as a homogeneous system, it often suffers from the same structural problems common to other agricultural systems (de Ollas et al, 2019), which are leading to a downsizing of cultivated areas and production, and faces similar challenges (Testa et al, 2015;Medda et al, 2022). In order to do this, awareness of the sector's critical issues must be raised: its future will depend on the strength of the ideas that entrepreneurs and technicians will translate into concrete actions.…”

Impact of Climate Change on Altered Fruit Quality with Organoleptic, Health Benefit, and Nutritional Attributes

“…As climate change is imminent, we need to discover tools that are efficacious and identify molecules that are potent and can break dormancy, overcome chilling injuries, and generate climate-smart cultivars . Overall, it appears that evergreen fruit plants exhibit better flexibility with respect to changes in the environment or anomalies in the climate than the deciduous fruit crops …”

The Biostimulant Effect of Hydroalcoholic Extracts of Sargassum spp. in Tomato Seedlings under Salt Stress

“…Plants, being sessile organisms, have the ability to defend themselves against environmental stresses through the expression of defense genes, which will make them have an arsenal of effector biomolecules; however, there are different alternatives, such as genetic engineering, that allow them to always keep certain genes of interest active (gene overexpression). However, there are also other alternatives, such as the use of biostimulants, specifically the use of brown alga extracts that have the ability to activate the plant defense system through the differential expression of genes [25,93,94].…”