Experimental evidence for stronger cacao yield limitation by pollination than by plant resources
By J. Groeneveld, T. Tscharntke, G. Moser, Y. Clough. 2010
146 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Both pollination and resource limitation may cause low fruit:flower ratios in plants, but pollen and resource limitation have never been contrasted in commercially important crop species. Here we experimentally investigated the relative effect of pollen limitation and resource limitation in Theobroma cacao. In Central Sulawesi, Indonesia, we applied different relative levels of hand pollination (10%, 40%, 70% and 100% of available flowers up to 2 m height) to mature cacao trees in two separate experiments encompassing (1) different light (shade roofs) and nitrogen (fertilizer application) treatments, and (2) water availability (throughfall displacement) treatments. None of the resource availability treatments had a significant effect, while number of mature pods and yield increased non-linearly with pollination intensity up to 200% of current yield levels. The largest benefits were reached by increasing pollination from 10% to 40%, with non-significant increases beyond that level. Despite an increase of fruit abortion with pollination intensity, T. cacao yield is determined, at least on the short term, by the number of flowers pollinated. This suggests pollination deficit in crops can be very large and that a better knowledge of pollen and resource limitation to devise adequate pollinator management strategies may be critical for increasing production. & 2010 R ¨ ubel Foundation, ETH Z ¨
Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Horticulture, Molecular Biology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/723f3ee50ef4422a60fa00d2152ee47f2a2c0f73
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In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
- T. Tscharntke
- Y. Clough
- C. Scherber
- I. Perfecto
- Thomas Cherico Wanger
- D. Buchori
- M. Kessler
- G. Schroth
In Horticulture
Citations in the corpus
- Multifunctional shade‐tree management in tropical agroforestry landscapes – a review (2011, background): “pollination and biological control), which will become even more important under environmental change, and employ integrated pest management (Franzen & Borgerhoff-Mulder 2007; Veddeler et al. 2008; Groeneveld et al. 2010)”