A new semi-automatic methodology for identifying olive cultivars
according to the appearance of leaves and fruit is intended to serve as
the basis for a phone app for producers and contributions to a new
international olive tree database, according to Konstantinos Blazakis, a
researcher working with Panagiotis Kalaitzis in the Department of
Horticultural Genetics and Biotechnology at the Mediterranean Agronomic
Institute of Chania (MAICh) in Crete, Greece.
Blazakis hopes one
application of this new method will be a cell phone app that will be
able to identify the cultivar based on a photo of an olive fruit, leaf,
or endocarp. He expects to start with Greek cultivars within the next
year or two and hopes to gain support to add international cultivars to
this app as a supplementary project later. He admits that the cell phone
app will probably be most helpful in countries where there are many
different olive varieties, as farmers want to be sure they know which
cultivar they have.
Another of Blazakis’s goals is to contribute
to a new international online database that will catalog information
about the appearance and chemical analysis, among other things, of olive
varieties worldwide. He said fifteen partners from a number of
countries are working together to prepare this user-friendly database
for the general public, which will be “based on the genetic,
physiological, molecular, and morphological study of each cultivar.” The
researchers intend to incorporate previous data, double checked for
accuracy, as well as adding new information.
This is part of the wide-ranging, ambitious Bioresources For
Oliviculture, or BeFOre, project which has received funding from the
European Union’s Horizon 2020
research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant
agreement and is also supported by the International Olive Council.
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