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Modeling phenological phases in a Mediterranean environment often implies tangible challenges to reconstructing regional trends over heterogenous areas using limited and scattered observations. The present investigation aimed to project phenological phases (i.e., sprouting, blooming, and pit hardening) for early and mid–late olive cultivars in the Mediterranean, comparing two phenological modeling approaches. Phenoflex is a rather integrated but data-demanding model, while a combined model of chill and anti-chill days and growing degree days (CAC_GDD) offers a more parsimonious and general approach in terms of data requirements for parameterization. We gathered phenological observations from nine experimental sites in Italy and temperature timeseries from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, Reanalysis v5. The best performances of the CAC_GDD (RMSE: 4 days) and PhenoFlex models (RMSE: 5–9.5 days) were identified for the blooming and sprouting phases of mid–late cultivars, respectively. The CAC_GDD model was better suited to our experimental conditions for projecting pit hardening and blooming dates (correlation: 0.80 and 0.70, normalized RMSE: 0.6 and 0.8, normalized standard deviation: 0.9 and 1.0). The optimization of the principal parameters confirmed that the mid–late cultivars were more adaptable to thermal variability. The spatial distribution illustrated the near synchrony of blooming dates between the early and mid–late cultivars compared to other phases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Potatoes (Solanum tuberosum L.) are one of the most valuable agricultural crops, and the flesh of these tubers provides various classes of healthy compounds important for human nutrition. This work presents the results of a joint analysis of different chemical classes of compounds which provided insights on the metabolic characterization of pigmented and non-pigmented potato varieties collected from Italy. The identification of common or individual metabolic characteristics across the omic datasets (antioxidants, total polyphenolic content, polyphenols, and sugars) is conducted by Joint and Individual Variation Explained (JIVE), a data fusion multivariate approach. The common part of the multivariate model allowed the separation between non-pigmented and pigmented samples. Polyphenolic compounds were mainly responsible for the separation between purple-fleshed and red-skinned potatoes. An additional detailed analysis of the anthocyanin composition, including the acylated anthocyanins, allowed to pinpoint the diversities between the pigmented potato groups. Furthermore, the presence of an appreciable amount of hydroxycinnamic acids and anthocyanins in the purple-fleshed varieties, which are also characterized by a lower content of sugars, is found. Our results provide scientific evidence for the promotion of promising potato cultivars, which are characterized by a remarkable amount of various health benefit compounds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]