Climate change impacts on temperate fruit and nut production: a systematic review.

Temperate fruit and nut crops require distinctive cold and warm seasons to meet their physiological requirements and progress through their phenological stages. Consequently, they have been traditionally cultivated in warm temperate climate regions characterized by dry-summer and wet-winter seasons. However, fruit and nut production in these areas faces new challenging conditions due to increasingly severe and erratic weather patterns caused by climate change. This review represents an effort towards identifying the current state of knowledge, key challenges, and gaps that emerge from studies of climate change effects on fruit and nut crops produced in warm temperate climates. Following the PRISMA methodology for systematic reviews, we analyzed 403 articles published between 2000 and 2023 that met the defined eligibility criteria. A 44-fold increase in the number of publications during the last two decades reflects a growing interest in research related to both a better understanding of the effects of climate anomalies on temperate fruit and nut production and the need to find strategies that allow this industry to adapt to current and future weather conditions while reducing its environmental impacts. In an extended analysis beyond the scope of the systematic review methodology, we classified the literature into six main areas of research, including responses to environmental conditions, water management, sustainable agriculture, breeding and genetics, prediction models, and production systems. Given the rapid expansion of climate change-related literature, our analysis provides valuable information for researchers, as it can help them identify aspects that are well understood, topics that remain unexplored, and urgent questions that need to be addressed in the future.

In Vitro Bioaccessibility of Carotenoids and Chlorophylls in a Diverse Collection of Spinach Accessions and Commercial Cultivars.

Spinach, a nutrient-dense, green-leafy vegetable, is a rich source of carotenoid and chlorophyll bioactives. While the content of bioactives is known to vary with the genotype, variation in bioaccessibility is unknown. Bioaccessibility was explored in 71 greenhouse-grown spinach genotypes in fall and spring 2018/2019. Spinach was phenotyped for its greenness, leaf texture, leaf shape, and SPAD chlorophyll content. Postharvest, spinach was washed, blanched, and homogenized prior to assessment of bioactive bioaccessibility using a novel high-throughput in vitro digestion model followed by high-performance liquid chromatography with a photodiode array detector analysis. There was a significant variation in the bioaccessible content for all bioactives (p < 0.05), except for chlorophyll b (p = 0.063) in spring-grown spinach. The correlation coefficients of bioaccessible contents between seasons reveal that lutein (r = 0.52) and ß-carotene (r = 0.55) were correlated to a greater extent than chlorophyll a (r = 0.38) and chlorophyll b (r = 0.19). The results suggest that carotenoid and chlorophyll bioaccessible contents may vary based on spinach genotypes and may be stable across seasons.