Castanea is a hardwood forest genus of considerable agro-economic importance for both timber and nut production. Chestnuts are one of the most significant nut crops in the temperate zone. However, this species is threatened by pollution, social factors, economical changes, and two major fungal diseases: ink disease (Phytophthora spp.), and chestnut blight canker (Cryphonectria parasitica). Simi...

Chestnuts (Castanea spp.) are ecologically and economically important forest fruit trees. They cultivated for their nutritious nuts. To select varieties to be in chestnut orchards, phenology needs considered. In this work, we adapt the international BBCH system chestnuts by building on an existing phenological scale used some European countries these species. The proposed uses eight of ten prin...

As near infrared spectra has the characters of multi-variables and strong correlations, to solve the problem, Fourier transform (FT) was used to extract feature variables of shelled chestnuts spectra. FT coefficients and the status of 178 chestnuts were selected as inputs and outputs of the back-propagation neural network (BPNN) classifier to build a recognition model. For comparison, principal...

Blight-resistant American chestnut (Castanea dentata) may soon be commercially available, but few studies have tested methods to produce high quality seedlings that will be competitive after planting. This study evaluated the performance of one American, one Chinese (C. mollissima), one second-generation backcross (BC3F2), and 10 third-generation backcross chestnut families (BC3F3). We examine ...

Chemical composition of eight sweet chestnut cultivars from the three protected designation of origin (PDO) areas in the Trás-osMontes region were studied: Aveleira, Rebordã, Trigueira and Zeive from PDO ‘Terra Fria’, Demanda, Longal and Martaı́nha from PDO ‘Soutos da Lapa’ and Judia from PDO ‘Padrela’. Chestnuts were characterised by high moisture content ( 50%), high levels of starch (43 g 100...

Chestnuts were collected either every 7 days from suspended nets used to intercept the fruits, every 2 days from the ground or every 7 days from the ground. Nuts were visually inspected after collection for the presence of exit holes of the chestnut weevil (Curculio elephas) and the chestnut moth (Cydia splendana), and 20 nuts per sampling and tree were bisected to assess fungal colonization. A...