PREDICTION OF THE LEAF AREA IN ZUCCHINI FRUIT: A NON DESTRUCTIVE, EXACT, SIMPLE, FAST AND PRACTICAL METHOD

Abstract

Non destructive methods aiming the estimation of the leaf area, fast, easily executed, with acceptable levels of accuracy are useful to the study of plants growing under field conditions. This way, the leaf area of zucchini fruit plants was estimated, through regression models. The leaf areas, measured by a leaf integrator were distributed according to the leaf dimension (length-C, wideness-L and of the product-CL) of the original leaves. Several estimators were generated, however, only the three most relevant were studied, among which, the best, statistically, was elected for validation analysis. We concluded that the leaf area of the zucchini fruit, grown in field, can be predicted, based on the leaf wideness (L), by the following estimator: , that, by its turn, was shown accurate, exact, simple, fast and practical, being reliable to predict this important agronomic variable.