An Improved Simulation Model for Tomato Plant Based on Physiological Development Time

As a very popular crop for production, tomatoes have been grown in greenhouses for nearly 100 years. In the greenhouse operation, predicting the entering date and duration of different development stages plays a very important role to provide guidance to precise control of greenhouse environment and get more economic profits. In this paper, an improved tomato development model based on the concept of physiological development time (PDT) is proposed and validated by the experiments conducted in the greenhouse of Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences. The results show the improved model has good applicability to different varieties of tomatoes and can predict the time and duration of different development stages with higher accuracy and precision.