Analysis of trends in Sweet Cherry flowering data across Europe

In temperate fruit trees, most key phenological stages are highly dependent on environmental conditions. In particular, correct timing for dormancy and flowering is essential to ensure good fruit production and quality. As a result, in a swiftly-changing environment, temperate fruit crop adaptation in many areas will be at risk in the coming decades. Global changes in environmental conditions include warmer winters and higher risks of frosts in the early spring, leading to a wide range of problems: flower and fruit set, sun-scald, cross-pollination or novel host-pest interaction.
With the final aim of better understanding the response of flowering to climatic conditions, we present a large-scale analysis of flowering data for various sweet cherry cultivars from numerous sites in Europe, characterized by a wide range of climatic conditions. These phenology data were provided through a national network of experimentation (Ctifl) and a European COST action on sweet cherry that INRA-Bordeaux is leading. This approach allowed extracting the main trends in flowering behaviour under different temperature conditions and selecting the best phenology models.
These results represent the first step towards developing a predictive model for flowering in sweet cherry based on both genomic and phenology data.