Climate change is reshaping the spring phenology of temperate fruit and nut trees worldwide, causing uneven bud break and yield losses across major production regions. Almond trees, including those cultivated in Afghanistan, are susceptible to these shifts. Afghanistan produces over 50 almond varieties, with official exports worth around USD 40 million in 2024. Yet, this value remains below potential due to multiple challenges...

Accurately predicting future events under novel environmental conditions is a central challenge in modeling, especially when no validation data are available. While model transferability is often discussed through the concept of a “forecast horizon,” we expand this framework by introducing the concept of “validity domains.” These consider not only the extrapolation distance from the calibration data but also the absolute posit...

Phenological datasets for temperate fruit trees are often short, fragmented and geographically restricted, which hampers the development of cultivar-specific spring phenology models. To address this, we propose a novel calibration approach (“combined-fitting”), which pools observations from several cultivars of the same species, distinguishing between shared and cultivar-specific parameters. This method requires fewer observat...

Temperate fruit trees require exposure to chill and heat conditions to overcome the dormant period in winter and resume growth in spring. Rising temperatures due to climate change have already impacted winter chill accumulation in horticulturally vital growing regions worldwide. Afghanistan’s intra-regional differences make the country favorable for producing a wide range of fruits and nuts, which constitute approximately 30%...

Winter chill accumulation plays a crucial role in determining the moment of bud burst in temperate fruit and nut trees, and insufficient chill can greatly limit yield potentials. To assess future cultivation options for such species in South America, we estimated winter chill through a spatial analysis. We used historical data (1980–2017) from 158 weather stations to calibrate a weather generator and produce temperature data f...