Strategies for managing spring frost risks in orchards: effectiveness and conditionality-a systematic review

Area of Science:

• Agricultural Science
• Horticulture
• Plant Science

Background:

• Spring frosts are a significant threat to temperate zone orchard productivity.
• Existing passive and active frost damage prevention strategies lack systematic comparison.
• Future climate projections suggest continued risk of damaging frost events.

Purpose of the Study:

• To compare the effectiveness of various spring frost damage reduction strategies in temperate fruit orchards.
• To investigate how environmental conditions influence the efficacy of these frost protection methods.
• To identify research gaps and trends in frost damage mitigation strategies.

Main Methods:

• Systematic review of on-field strategies for protecting flowering orchards against late spring frost.
• Included temperate fruit tree crops and grapevines, analyzing bud/flower survival, yield, and flowering time.
• Searched multiple databases (Web of Science, Scopus, etc.) and institutional websites for studies published up to October 2021, identifying 104 relevant studies from 8970 initial records.

Main Results:

• Sprinkler systems demonstrated the best performance across most studied outcomes.
• Emerging biochemical solutions yielded mixed results, and resource-intensive heating systems did not outperform low-resource techniques like tunnels or bud coverings.
• Low study validity due to infrequent reporting of variability measures limited detailed analysis and transferability of findings.

Conclusions:

• Significant shortcomings exist in the documentation of experimental setups and reporting standards within frost protection research.
• Recommendations are provided to reduce bias and enhance the comparability of future studies.
• Current findings have limited implications for policy making due to data limitations.