Strategies for managing spring frost risks in orchards: effectiveness and conditionality—a systematic review

Background Spring frosts pose an important threat to orchard productivity in temperate zones and projections do not exclude damaging events in the future. However, there is no up-to-date and systematic comparison of the effectiveness and conditionality of the existing passive and active damage prevention strategies. This systematic review seeks to answer the questions “How do the performances of spring frost damage reduction strategies in temperate fruit orchards compare?” and “How do environmental conditions affect the effectiveness of frost damage reduction strategies in temperate fruit orchards?”. Methods This review covers a large range of on-field strategies for the protection of flowering orchards against damage inflicted by late spring frost. All major temperate fruit tree crops and grapevines were included, provided that the performance of frost damage reduction was compared against a control in terms of bud and flower survival, yield and delays in flowering time, or ambient temperature change. Articles and reports were collected between June and October 2021 from the Web of Science Core Collection and regional indexes and from the databases Scopus, FAO AGRIS, USDA Agricola, CAB Abstracts and the Groenekennis database of the University of Wageningen, the Netherlands, as well as from relevant institutional websites and the Chinese scholarly search engine ‘Baidu’. Biases resulting from inadequate randomisation, incomplete reporting or deficient study designs were reported. Temporal and spatial research trends and gaps were mapped based on 104 selected studies (from 8970 identified studies). Data was extracted for every experiment that an article reported on, leading to 971 data points. Groups of frost protection methods were compared in terms of effectiveness whereby environmental factors were examined to explain the variation of the effectiveness by means of mixed linear models. Review findings Most included studies originate from the United States and Europe more than from the temperate fruit production regions in Asia. An increase over time in the research on foliar applications, including growth regulation hormones was observed. Apple, peach and more recently grapevine were the most researched fruit types, followed by cherry and pear. The validity of the selected studies was generally low as measures of variability were reported only occasionally. Therefore, only descriptive comparisons of effectiveness were undertaken between intervention classes by fruit types. Sprinkler systems were found to perform best for most studied outcomes, while the emerging biochemical solutions revealed mixed results. The performances of resource-intensive heating systems did not outperform low-resource techniques such as tunnels or coverings of individual buds. The lack of reporting standards did not allow extensive correlations with ambient factors and reduced the transferability of the review’s findings. A need for standard protocols for experiments and reporting is therefore apparent. Conclusions In this field, strong shortcomings in the documentation of experimental setups and reporting standards were exposed. Implications for policy making are limited while for research recommendations to reduce bias and increase comparability are put forward.