Impact of CO 2 Enrichment on Growth, Yield and Fruit Quality of F1 Hybrid Strawberry Grown under Controlled Greenhouse Condition.

Carbon dioxide enrichment inside a greenhouse is a sustainable approach to increasing crop production worldwide. Recently, the F1 hybrid strawberry became an alternative to runner-propagated cultivation as an innovative method to shorten the production period and increase strawberry production. This work aims to present CO₂ enrichment as a sustainable tool that improves the yield in a controlled greenhouse and addresses the efficiency of three F1 hybrid strawberry varieties grown under Saudi Arabian conditions. A greenhouse experiment was conducted at the National Research and Development Center for Sustainable Agriculture (Estidamah), KSA, to study the impact of two CO₂ levels (400 ppm ("ambient") and 600 ppm ("enrichment")) on the growth, photosynthesis traits, fruit yield and fruit quality of three F1 hybrid strawberry varieties grown under soilless culture conditions. The results show that CO₂ enrichment significantly improved the phenotyping of strawberry growth traits at 60 days post-transplanting. The physiological response of the varieties to CO₂ enrichment reveals a significant increase in the photosynthetic rate (129.7%) and intercellular CO₂ (43.7%) in the leaves of strawberry exposed to CO₂ enrichment rather than in ambient conditions, combined with a significant increase in the number of fruits per plant (27.5%) and total fruit yield (42.2%). A similar pattern was observed with varieties D and S in terms of fruit number, length and diameter. However, CO₂ at 600 ppm promoted total soluble solid accumulation and vitamin C for the tested varieties. In contrast, CO₂ enrichment significantly decreased nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium and magnesium accumulation in the leaves of the exposed plants in comparison to 400 ppm of CO₂. These results suggest that increasing CO₂ enrichment could contribute to an increase in strawberry yield and nutritional value and demonstrate that understanding the response of each variety to CO₂ enrichment is important to support selecting suitable greenhouse strawberry varieties to improve crop yield. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]