Insect pollination as a key factor for strawberry physiology and marketable fruit quality

By Alexander Wietzke, C. Westphal, P. Gras, M. Kraft, K. Pfohl, P. Karlovsky, E. Pawelzik, T. Tscharntke, I. Smit. 2018

116 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract About 35% of global crop production arises from crop species that benefit from animal pollination, especially by insects. Animal pollination can enhance yields and increase fruit quality, but the effects of insect pollination on pre- and post-harvest fruit physiology and quality are largely unknown. For the first time, we analysed in much detail the physiological responses of fruit development and marketable quality improvements to different pollination treatments such as self-pollination, open-pollination and hand-pollination. In strawberries, self-pollination led to reduced seed set (fertilized achenes), reduced concentration of the phytohormone auxin, highest share of deformed fruits (>90%), smallest and lightest fruits, considerably lower commercial value (8% of the value of open- or hand-pollinated fruits), and reduced shelf life of fruits. Overall, insect pollination increased the average commercial value of marketable fruits by 92%. The commercial value of hand-pollinated and open-pollinated strawberries did not differ. We conclude that pollination services are not merely important for yield, but also vital for physiological processes that result in better marketable quality (e.g. fruit appearance, flavour-enhancing constituents, prolonged shelf life) and commercial value of many pollinator-dependent crops.

Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Insect Science, Plant Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/db1df96aa58584b3c5ac7a4394b1773112ae8f78

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In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

In Insect Science

In Plant Science

Citations in the corpus

Pollination by wild bees yields larger strawberries than pollination by honey bees (2019, background): “As such, insect pollination can increase yields, reduce malformations and increase the shelf life and value of strawberries (Goodman & Oldroyd, 1988; Klatt et al., 2014; Wietzke et al., 2018).”
Pollinator monitoring more than pays for itself (2020, background): “…monitoring with a specific question or focus may be more efficient at addressing specific management issues and developing adaptive management responses (Nicholas & Williams, 2006), but may be less effective at establishing baseline data or discovering ‘unknown unknowns’ (Wintle et al., 2010).”
Current Progress and Future Prospects of Agriculture Technology: Gateway to Sustainable Agriculture (2021, background): “The remote sensors can be used to analyze crop processing, including disease and pests, plant health, and the environment [43,44].”
Internet-of-Things (IoT)-Based Smart Agriculture: Toward Making the Fields Talk (2019, background): “sufficient pollination with good quality pollen especially when predicting seed yields under changing environmental conditions [67]–[69].”