Abstract 

Perennial horticulture is facing many challenges as consumers and societies reconsider what is expected of future food systems in the face of population growth and urbanisation, climate change, biodiversity loss, and supply chain and other shocks. Digital technologies offer many opportunities for increasing the precision and sophistication of production systems and supply chains in response to these challenges. Digital twins are increasingly being adopted across diverse fields to monitor, analyse, simulate and control complex systems, and The New Zealand Institute for Plant and Food Research Limited (Plant & Food Research) is now embarking on an ambitious attempt to develop a digital twin for apple production and supply chain systems.  Our goal is to dynamically couple physical components of apple orchard and postharvest systems with their virtual analogues.  The digital twin will direct sensors and external interfaces to obtain input data from the real world, and prescribe optimal interventions based on models that robustly simulate the impact of selected biotic and abiotic stresses on key physiological, ecological and quality modifying processes. We are actively seeking collaborators to assist us in this endeavour.    

In this presentation, we will introduce the approach Plant & Food Research is proposing to leverage the transformative opportunities offered through such purposeful integration of biology and digital technologies.   For apple production, we are focussing initially on growth of ‘Royal Gala’ using the planar cordon system and employing GrapevineXL as the base model. We will introduce our new functional-structural plant model framework and detail some of the physiological modelling work we are conducting.  We will also outline the associated programmes we are developing for data acquisition, agroecosystem modelling, data and model integration, and understanding the values of different stakeholders in perennial food systems.