Prediction of Dormancy Release and Bud Burst in Korean Grapevine Cultivars Using Daily Temperature Data

An accurate prediction of dormancy release and bud burst in temperate zone fruit trees is indispensable for farmers to plan heating time under partially controlled environments as well as to reduce the risk of frost damage in open fields. A thermal time-based two-step phenological model that originated in Italy was applied to two important grapevine cultivars in Korea for predicting bud-burst dates. The model consists of two sequential periods: a rest period described by chilling requirement and a forcing period described by heating requirement. It requires daily maximum and minimum temperature as an input and calculates daily chill units (chill days in negative sign) until a pre-determined chilling requirement for rest release is met. After the projected rest release date, it adds daily heat units (anti-chill days in positive sign) to the chilling requirement. The date when the sum reaches zero isregarded as the bud-burst in the model. Controlled environment experiments using field sampled twigs of 'Campbell Early' and 'Kyoho' cultivars were carried out in the vineyard at the National Horticultural Research Institute (NHRI) in Suwon during 2004-2005 to derive the model parameters: threshold temperature for chilling and chilling requirement for breaking dormancy. The model adjusted with the selected parameters was applied to the 1994-2004 daily temperature data obtained from the automated weather station in the NHRI vineyard to estimate bud burst dates of two cultivars and the results were compared with the observed data. The model showed a consistently good performance in predicting the bud burst of 'Campbell Early' and 'Kyoho' cultivars with 2.6 and 2.5 days of root mean squared error, respectively.