Preprint Article Version 1 Preserved in Portico This version is not peer-reviewed

Predictive Model to Evaluate Water and Nutrient Uptake in Vertically Grown Lettuce under Mediterranean Greenhouse Conditions

Manuel Felipe López Mora
ORCID logo ,
María Fernanda Quintero Castellanos
* ,
Carlos Alberto González Murillo
,
Calina Borgovan
,
María del Carmen Salas Sanjuan
ORCID logo ,
Miguel Guzmán
* ORCID logo
Version 1 : Received: 29 December 2023 / Approved: 4 January 2024 / Online: 4 January 2024 (15:07:12 CET)

A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.

López Mora, M.F.; Quintero Castellanos, M.F.; González Murillo, C.A.; Borgovan, C.; Salas Sanjuan, M.C.; Guzmán, M. Predictive Model to Evaluate Water and Nutrient Uptake in Vertically Grown Lettuce under Mediterranean Greenhouse Conditions. Horticulturae 2024, 10, 117. López Mora, M.F.; Quintero Castellanos, M.F.; González Murillo, C.A.; Borgovan, C.; Salas Sanjuan, M.C.; Guzmán, M. Predictive Model to Evaluate Water and Nutrient Uptake in Vertically Grown Lettuce under Mediterranean Greenhouse Conditions. Horticulturae 2024, 10, 117.

Abstract

Agriculture is the main driver of depletion resources worldwide, and its duty is to ensure food security within a rapidly increasing demographic and urbanization, so it is important to transition to sustainable production systems. Vertical crops (VCs) can reduce the pressure on conventional agriculture because they save water and nutrients and increase crop yield. Therefore, this study aimed to validate a proposed predictive model (PM) to simulate water and nutrient uptake in vertical crops under greenhouse conditions. Based on the Penman-Monteith equation, PM estimates transpiration, while nutrient uptake was estimated using the Carmassi-Sonneveld submodel. PM was experimentally evaluated for vertically grown lettuce under Mediterranean greenhouse conditions, during spring 2023. The irrigation technique was a closed-loop fertigation circuit. The experimental consisted of testing two densities (50 and 80 plants·m-2), where each unit of the experiment unit was divided into three heights (low, medium, and upper). It performed ANOVA with a value of p < 0.05 and R2 to assess PM performance. The results suggest a high degree of PM, since R2 ranged from 0.7 to 0.9 for the uptake of water and nutrients. Both densities had a yield between 17-20 times higher than conventional lettuce production and significant savings in water, between 85-88%. In this sense, PM has great potential to intelligently manage VC fertigation, saving water and nutrients, which represents an advance towards reaching SDG 6 and SDG 12, within the 2030 Agenda.

Keywords

vertical crops; urban agriculture; hydroponics; sustainability; closed-loop fertigation systems; crop modelling; protected horticulture; .

Subject

Biology and Life Sciences, Horticulture

Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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