Pruning Biomass Potential in Italy Related to Crop Characteristics, Agricultural Practices and Agro-Climatic Conditions

This work, developed under the EuroPruning Project, aims to look at relations between pruning biomass production and several factors related both to crop species and management. The aim is to find out mathematical relations that allow improvement of the biomass potential assessment. This is generally calculated using biomass production ratios. These ratios are variable due to the influence of several aspects. On the one hand there are crop characteristics—such as species, cultivar, and age—and on the other, crop management, which is often associated to local habits and conditions such as the training system, planting pattern, density, pruning methods, irrigation and climate. This work has been produced by gathering data from literature reviews and surveying. The subset of Italian records in the EuroPruning database consists of 70 records. Each record contains the biomass production ratio and eight agronomic variables. Additionally, a set of six climatic and agro-climatic groups of variables (in total 28 variables) have been added to each record. Moderate to good correlations have been found, especially with few climatic factors. As a result, two regression models are proposed for the evaluation of the vineyard and olive tree pruning biomass ratios for Italy, and applied to assess pruning biomass potential.