A hierarchical dataset of vegetative and reproductive growth in apple tree organs under conventional and non-limited carbon resources

A monitoring of apple fruit, shoot and trunk growth was per-formed on 15 trees, equally split according to three treat-ments, which determined heavily contrasting carbon assim-ilate availability: unmanipulated trees (FRU), thinned trees (THI) and defruited trees (DEF). Several variables describe the vegetative growth on FRU and DEF trees (shoot length, base diameter, number of fruits on shoot, and height, diameter, pruning intensity and number of fruits of the branch carrying the shoot; trunk circumfer-ence), as well as the fruit growth on FRU and THI trees (3 fruit diameters). Additional measurements from ancillary shoots (apical diameter, number of leaves, leaf dry weight, stem dry weight, fresh mass, volume) and fruits (3 diameters, dry weight) from trees undergoing the same treatments, pro-vide a more complete (destructive) characterization of organs growth, thanks to several measurements performed across the growing season. Organs are provided with categorical variables indicating the treatment, tree, canopy height, orien-tation (for both shoots and fruit), as well as branch and shoot identifiers, so that hierarchical modeling of the dataset can be performed. The dataset is completed with dates and day of the year of the measurements and the accumulated grow-ing degree days from full bloom. Data can be used to calcu-late apple tree absolute and relative growth rates, maximum potential growth rates, as well as shoot growth responses to thinning and pruning. The dataset can also be used to cali-brate allometric relationships, estimate structural apple tree growth parameters and their variability.(c) 2023 Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)