Matthew Fidelibus

Red and blue filters above the tomato plants with the monitoring sensors. The infrared radiometer, directed to the canopy under the blue treatment is shown in the right-bottom panel while the Atmos 14 and PAR sensors appear in the lower panels as installed on white PVC tubes.

🍅 From Energy Nexus: Spectral agrivoltaic panels cut tomato yields but improved water use efficiency and land productivity by producing both crops and solar power. (Majdi Abou Najm, Andre Daccache, Mohamed Emami)

▶️ www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

#PlantScience #AgEngineering #Agrivoltaics

Leading Fermentation Scientist David E. Block Earns ASEV's Highest Honor Press Release - UC Davis researcher honored for advancing modern fermentation science and winery practice

Congrats to David Block @ucdavis.bsky.social, who will receive the American Society for Enology and Viticulture Merit Award to recognize his career achievements turning "science into better tools and practices for winemakers."

@viticulture.bsky.social www.winebusiness.com/news/article...

It could but depends on the weather from here on

Sunpreme, an early raisin grape variety, is pretty much at budbreak today, which is several days early

Looking for sources for a @nature.com story about how researchers are coping in the midst of current events: If you're a PhD or other academic who's struggling to focus with everything that's happening in the world and would like to be interviewed for this story, please get in touch ASAP!

“Everything that’s below about 6,000 or 7,000 feet anywhere in the West is not doing well in terms of snowpack because it has been record warm,” @weatherwest.bsky.social @ucanr.edu told @ianjames.bsky.social

The Eisen Brothers and the birth of Fresno's raisin industry Francis Eisen's first raisin crop came by accident, after a heat wave left his Muscat grapes dried on the vine in 1877.

Fresno's first raisin crop: dry-on-vine Muscat of Alexandria: www.kvpr.org/podcast/cent...

Map showing current temperatures in California (from PivotalWeather.com). It depicts balmy and even record warmth in the mountains and hills, as well as SoCal, with temperatures into the 70s and 80s in these areas, but very chilly temperatures in the Central Valley remaining in the low 40s under a dense fog layer.

Central California is currently experiencing one of the most remarkable temperature inversions I've ever seen in this part of the world. The Central Valley remains miserably damp & chilly under dense fog layer, but it's balmily warm & sunny just 2,000ft up nearby mountain slopes!

Fig. 1 (shortened, full legend in paper): Schematic representation of key molecular players of specific hormones involved in progressive fruit development including pollen germination (stage I), pollen tube elongation (stage II), fertilization (stage III), and fruit set (stage IV). Ethylene signaling components, including ETHYLENE INSENSITIVE (EIN1 and EIN2) and the response factor ETHYLENE RESPONSE FACTOR (ERF1), are activated to facilitate pollination, followed by a sharp decline in ethylene levels post-pollination and fruit set, concomitant with the down-regulation of its biosynthetic enzymes 1-aminocyclopropane-1-carboxylic acid (ACC) synthase (ACS) and ACC oxidase (ACO). The brassinosteroid (BR) biosynthetic gene CYP90A1 enhances pollen germination and tube growth, while BR signaling via BRASSINAZOLE RESISTANT1 (BZR1) regulates ovary maturation.

🍎 REVIEW 🍎

Baral et al. highlight how plant hormones orchestrate early fruit development after pollination, revealing key molecular pathways that control fruit initiation and offering insights to improve crop productivity and stress resilience.

🔗 doi.org/10.1093/jxb/...

#PlantScience 🧪

Fresno County uproots 20% of lost winegrape acreage in CA - Mid Valley Times Fresno County has ripped out more than 6,000 acres of wine grapes as part of a trend to reduce the crop’s acreage across California.

California growers removed almost 40,000 acres of #wine grapes this past year, with San Joaquin and Fresno Counties leading the way midvalleytimes.com/article/news...

Six band members pose with Gary May as he sits behind the drums.

Last week, the UC Davis College of Engineering band, The Technically Hip, brought some rhythm to Chancellor Gary May's faculty happy hour. They added an honorary member, May himself, because engineers know how to rock. 🎸

Meet the band: https://ow.ly/Kv1I50XylPe

Figure 1. Autonomous tractor (www.monarchtractor.com) (left) and autonomous sprayer (www.gussag.com) (right).

🚜 From Journal of Agricultural Safety Health: As robotics reshape farm work, researchers call for urgent study of human–machine safety, event tracking, and collaboration to protect agricultural workers. (Farzaneh Khorsandi)
▶️ pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40794928/
#AgEngineering #Agriculture

Assistant Professor of Plant Pathology in Davis, CA for University of California Davis Health System Exciting opportunity in Davis, CA for University of California Davis Health System as a Assistant...

#UCD is hiring an assistant prof for #plantpathology! #jobs #plantjobs jobs.plantae.org/jobs/ja/2179...

Goodbye, Pinot Noir — hello, Paseante Noir? Where Ojai Vineyard winemaker Adam Tolmach once grew grapes with household names, he planted hybrid varieties no consumer had ever heard of. Now he's making pioneering new wines.

Hybrid wine grape varieties bred by UC Davis to be resistant to Pierce's disease are off to a good start www.latimes.com/food/story/2...

Fig. 1. Overview of the CV case study, showing California state with CV borders and almond/grape fields locations for 2023.

🌱 From Agricultural and Forest Meteorology: Compound and cascading climate extremes are intensifying in California’s farm valleys, shifting northward and amplifying risks to crops like almonds and grapes. (Andre Daccache)
▶️ www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
#PlantScience

Scientists no Longer Find Twitter Professionally Useful, and have Switched to Bluesky Synopsis. Social media has become widely used by the scientific community for a variety of professional uses, including networking and public outreach. For

WOW! Our survey of scientists who stopped using Twitter and started using Bluesky is now the #1 most-shared on social media article in the history of the journal Integrative and Comparative Biology! Thanks for reading it, everyone! @sicbjournals.bsky.social

doi.org/10.1093/icb/... 🧪

The reduced canopy area in esca-symptomatic grapevine plants leads to lower canopy transpiration and mitigates water stress (Ninon Dell’Acqua, Gregory A Gambetta, Megan K Bartlett, et al) doi.org/10.1093/plph... #PlantScience

The cover art on our new issue features this #OpenAccess #PlantScience paper on #grape #domestication! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Our 2-acre Sunpreme vineyard ended up filling 21.5 boxes with raisins. At most, a full box of raisins might weigh 1,000 pounds, so the vineyard probably made about 5 tons of raisins/acre, which is about 2.5 times more than a typical Thompson Seedless raisin vineyard.

Last week our raisins were dry enough to pick but we didn't have the labor in place. Then we got nearly an inch of rain and now the raisins are wetter than they should be but with the possibility of more rain and cooler weather we decided to put what we had and finish drying

Map depicting the total column water vapor over the SW in 3 days, as depicted by ECMWF model. It is extremely high over California, and represents a true tropical airmass over the region (which is very unusual!).

A very unusual stretch of September weather will continue across California into next week. On Sunday, a weak stream of tropical moisture may drop some showers in far SoCal (near San Diego). But a more impressive/widespread thunderstorm outbreak will be possible Tuesday... #CAwx

A new lab pub is now available for free download: oeno-one.eu/article/view... We found that preharvest application of plant hormones that loosen the attachment of grapes to clusters reduced destemming wounds and improved quality of destemmed red grapes but caused white grapes to brown in storage.

We only just started picking a dry-on-vine DOV raisin research trial before it started raining. DOV raisins are somewhat more resistant to rain than tray dry, but 1" of rain is predicted which is an awful lot. I wish everyone in the San Joaquin Valley with unpicked or unprotected crops the best 🤞

Wild weather week possible in California as humid heat transitions to potential dry-to-wet thunderstorm outbreak thanks to tropical storm remnants - Weather West Early September lightning outbreak brings many wildfires, with some damage, but lack of NorCal drought prevents worse outcome The month of September started with a bang--or, rather, the near-constant rumble of thunder from thousands of lightning strikes amid an intense thunderstorm outbreak that affected a broad portions of interior central and much of northern California.

New Weather West post out on potentially widespread and significant thunderstorm outbreak later this week across much of California thanks to then-former Tropical Storm Mario's remnants. I discuss caveats re: dry lightning and more within... weatherwest.com/arch... #CAwx #CAfire

Plant’s developmental decision to either abort a flower or set seed A significant proportion of flowers in crop plants fail to produce seeds, particularly under heat and drought stress. This outcome reflects a regulated developmental process of reproductive abortion, shaped by a complex interplay of genetic, hormonal, and environmental factors that limit crop yield. Unlike abscission, reproductive abortion can occur at multiple developmental stages. In this review, we examine how internal and external cues disrupt the development of florets, ovules, embryos, and seeds in major food crops, including cereals, legumes, and brassicas, under both optimal and stress conditions. Drawing from research in arabidopsis and extending to crop systems, we identify conserved and crop-specific mechanisms, highlight critical knowledge gaps, and propose strategies to enhance reproductive resilience and seed set under abiotic stresses.

Plant’s developmental decision to either abort a flower or set seed #plantscience

Red line graph time series of monthly carbon dioxide abundance from January 1959 through August 2025. There is a seasonal cycle and long-term increasing trend. Current levels of CO2 are at 425 ppm. This is the Keeling Curve graph. A line for CO2 10 years ago is also annotated.

Carbon dioxide (CO₂) averaged about 425 ppm in August 2025

10 years ago August averaged about 399 ppm

Data available at gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/

In this grower participative study on Pinot Noir, the “high yield = low quality” paradigm proved grossly oversimplified: yield reductions didn’t consistently improve ripeness or quality.🍇🍇#viticulture #wine
buff.ly/HzoTSs4

Grape Day Shows San Joaquin Valley Growers ‘What Works in Our Area, for Our Crops’ Grape Day at the Kearney Agricultural Research and Extension Center – a time-honored learning event dating to the late 1960s.

Grape Day is one of my core extension efforts. Here's a summary of this year's meeting: www.morningagclips.com/grape-day-sh... #viticulture #grape #ucdavis

#iamabotanist #herbarium #botany2025

Map from ECMWF ensemble depicting (normalized) 500mb GPH anomalies around 8-9 days from today. It shows a large/strong ridge (big red blob) centered just inland of the West Coast, coinciding with a major heatwave.

Map from ECMWF ensemble showing snapshot of temperature anomalies during projected heatwave ~8 days from now. Much hotter than average temperatures (red and pink shades) are widespread across the West, especially interior California and the broader SW.

After an unusual summer #AtmosphericRiver brings substantial rain to portions of coastal WA and OR this week, a major heatwave will likely develop across much of the West once again 7-10 days from now--with peak intensity in desert SW but likely also affecting much of California.