Fecha de publicación: 06/01/2024 Fuente: ISHS (International Society for Horticultural Science) Post date: Saturday 6 January 2024
Author:
ISHS Secretariat

Muthianzhele Ravuluma is a PhD candidate at the University of the Free State, South Africa. His research is focused on estimating the current and future use of water in pomegranate orchards in the Western Cape, South Africa. Establishing crops tolerant to water stress is essential to improve food availability. As the climate in South Africa is semi-arid and prone to droughts, climate change is exacerbating the situation with increasing temperatures, increased evaporative demand, more frequent occurrence of droughts, more erratic rainfall and shifts in rainfall patterns. To mitigate these challenges, South Africa must improve water use efficiency and introduce drought-tolerant crops such as pomegranate. This study aims to model current and future water use of selected pomegranate orchards under future climate change scenarios for two study sites in the Western Cape. Weather parameters are being collected to calculate reference evapotranspiration (ETo), which will be related to tree and orchard water use to obtain crop coefficients for irrigation scheduling. Transpiration and evapotranspiration are being measured using the heat ratio method (sap flow) and the eddy covariance (surface renal). Data has been collected for the 2022/23 growing season, and more is currently being collected for the 2023/24 growing season. The sap flow measurements will be used to get the basal crop coefficient, and the eddy covariance measurements will be used to get the single crop coefficient. Light interception will be measured to relate to the canopy structure to develop an alternative way to estimate the crop coefficients. ET will be estimated using a conformal-cubic atmospheric model (CCAM) with the data obtained from global climate models (GCMs).
Muthianzhele Ravuluma won the ISHS Young Minds Award for the best poster presentation at the XII International Workshop on Sap Flow in New Zealand in October-November 2023.
Muthianzhele Ravuluma, ARC Infruitec-Nietvoorbij, Private Bag X5026, 7599 Stellenbosch, South Africa, e-mail: ravulumam@arc.agric.za
The article is available in Chronica HorticulturaeTags: pomegranateCategories: Young Minds Award Winners