Modeling of apricot flowers and fruits distribution in relation to shoot organization and tree architecture.
Résumé
The flowers of the apricot tree are axillary on the prophylls of one-year-old buds. We observed the distribution of the number of flowers and fruits per node on 'Rouge du Roussillon', at two different locations in France. The results are presented considering the number of successive nodes bearing a given number of flowers along the growth units. These series are geometrically distributed. This allows us to use a first order Markov chains to model the sequence of nodes in a flowering or a non-flowering state. On long shoots, we observed differences in the total number of flowers per growth unit and in the number of flowers per node. The same model is applied to the presence or absence of fruits at each node. Finally we studied the probability of a flower to develop into a fruit.