AdaMedOr project meeting in Meknès, Morocco

How will climate change impact the future performance of fruit tree orchards in the Mediterranean area? Which combination of fruit tree species or cultivars should the farmers choose for a resilient production for future climatic conditions? These are questions the “Adapting Mediterranean Orchards” (short AdaMedOr) project aims to answer. The project is founded by PRIMA and runs from mid of 2020 until end of 2023. It is a consortium of researches in Morocco, Tunisia, Spain and Germany. To coordinate the progress of the project a meeting took place from the 6th to the 8th of September in Meknès, Morocco. The HortiBonn group was represented by the AdaMedOr project coordinator Prof. Dr. Eike Luedeling, as well as Ph.D. students Hajar Mojahid and Lars Caspersen.

The meeting took place at the campus of the National School of Agriculture of Meknès (ENA). Some of the project partners met for the first time in person thanks to the pandemic and it was a great opportunity to get updates on everyone’s progress. Great advances were made in the collection of phenological data and the experimentation on the dormancy of different fruit tree cultivars. Furthermore, the newly developed fruit tree model “PhenoFlex” (Luedeling et al., 2021) was demonstrated and first result using the model were shared (Fernández et al., 2022). But there is still plenty of work ahead. The partners agreed to coordinate efforts for making projections on fruit tree phenology and for organizing workshops for climate adapted fruit tree portfolios. The meeting was also used to investigate possibilities to strengthen the partners cooperations outside of the project in form of student or staff exchanges. Furthermore, the project partners visited fruit tree orchards in the region, the medinas of Meknès and Fès as well as ruins from Roman times. All in all, the meeting was a great success, and it is safe to say that every attendee was happy to be part of it. Special thanks to our hosts Prof. Ossama Kodad (National School of Agriculture of Meknès) and Prof. Adnane El Yaacoubi (École Supérieure de Technologie, Khénifra) for the great organization and the support.

Fernández, E., Schiffers, K., Urbach, C., & Luedeling, E. (2022). Unusually warm winter seasons may compromise the performance of current phenology models–Predicting bloom dates in young apple trees with PhenoFlex. Agricultural and Forest Meteorology, 322, 109020, doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agrformet.2022.109020
Luedeling, E., Schiffers, K., Fohrmann, T., & Urbach, C. (2021). PhenoFlex-an integrated model to predict spring phenology in temperate fruit trees. Agricultural and Forest Meteorology, 307, 108491, doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agrformet.2021.108491