Young apple tree development under agroforestry radiative conditions: a multi-scale morphological and architectural...

Agroforestry is a major adaptation and mitigation strategy facing climate warming, but its agronomic viability depends on actual plant responses to shade conditions. Growing fruit trees under dominant trees may reduce the risks related to extreme climatic events, such as frost or heat waves. Nonetheless, except for some sciaphilous plants, such as coffee or cacao, their physiological and architectural responses to agroforestry conditions are little known, especially in temperate climate. We present a dataset describing the architecture and morphology of 45 young apple trees, acquired in two consecutive years, along a radiative gradient, as in three growing conditions of an agroforestry plot: (i) the open field, (ii) between, and (iii) along rows of dominant walnut trees. The data are stored as standard multi-scale tree graphs that allow to store the topology, geometry, and attributes of the plant at different scales. It includes plant traits at three topological scales: whole tree, growth unit, and the internode. The traits include organ fate (latent, vegetative, floral bud, and bud extinction sites); length and an estimate of the leaf area of growth units; diameter, zenith, and azimuth angles of second-order branches. The number of leaves, flowers, fruits, and fruit drops is also counted on a sample of 10, possibly apical, flower buds per tree. The dataset includes ancillary measurements on sampled shoots, used to derive allometric relationships between shoot length and leaf area; and an estimate of the radiation reaching each apple tree during the vegetative season. The multi-scale description and the different light growing conditions characterizing the digitized trees allow to investigate relationships between the shade-related agroforestry environment and the apple tree morphological and architectural plasticity, during the early tree development, from the internode to the whole tree.