Apples, which are the most cultivated fruit in France, are mainly endangered by the fungal pathogen Venturia inaequalis that cause apple scab disease on apple. This disease can be responsible of major products loss unless orchards are treated against apple scab. Nowadays in France, the phytopathological diseases management policies are encouraging growers to reduce considerably the use of pesticides, while keeping a high quality and yield level. In this context, one must understand better how the plant, the pathogen and their environment, interact with each other: for apple scab, the most important environmental parameter is leaf wetness duration. During this work, we studied leaf wetness duration to understand the interactions that occur between the tree microclimate and the wetness duration. To do that we divided our work in three major steps : the modeling of evaporation of a droplet at rest on a leaf, the experimental study of apple leaves wettability, and the experimental study of wetness duration spatial variability within an apple trees orchard. This study led us to clarify the strong intra-crown variability of leaf wetness duration through the consideration of tree structure and hourly dynamics of microclimate. The model we developed, beyond the known links between the evaporative flux intensity and the climatic parameters, showed a strong sensibility of the evaporation duration to the substrate wettability, highlighting the necessity to quantify at best this interaction, through the estimation of static and dynamic contact angles.
Contribution to the study of the wetting time within an apple tree canopy