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Record W4414984132 · doi:10.1007/s10341-025-01562-w

Humidity Control and Its Implications in the Storage of Apples and Pears: A Review

2025· article· en· W4414984132 on OpenAlexafffund
Robert K. Prange, A. Harrison Wright, Barbara J. Daniels-Lake, Daniel Alexandre Neuwald, Dirk Köpcke, Luiz Carlos Argenta

Bibliographic record

VenueApplied Fruit Science · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldAgricultural and Biological Sciences
TopicPostharvest Quality and Shelf Life Management
Canadian institutionsNova Scotia Department of AgricultureAgriculture and Agri-Food Canada
FundersAgriculture and Agri-Food Canada
KeywordsPostharvestPEARHumidityRelative humidityControlled atmosphereWaxing

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract At harvest, the water content of apples and pears is at its maximum, about 83–85% by mass. The rate of fruit water loss after harvest is a function of three factors: the fruit surface area, the epidermis water vapour permeance, and the difference in internal and external fruit water vapour pressure. However, the water vapour pressure difference is the only factor that can be controlled during storage, i.e. by altering the storage humidity. Curiously, most publications on apple and pear storage do not discuss storage humidity even though the postharvest quality of both depends largely upon it. Apples and pears can experience up to ~ 2% mass loss without loss of commercial value, but further mass loss creates visible shrivelling, and may also increase bitter pit, depending on the cultivar. The prevailing commercial advice has been to minimise mass loss by maximising the relative humidity at the chosen storage temperature. However, this advice should be re-evaluated, and humidity management protocols revised, from minimising mass loss to optimising mass loss. Growing evidence indicates that storage humidity affects the postharvest performance of apples and pears. A review of the literature over the last 100 years shows that some mass loss, achieved by lowering storage atmosphere humidity, can improve apple and pear quality by reducing non-bitter pit disorders, bruising, respiration, ethylene production and decay, especially if the mass loss occurs at the beginning of storage. The effects of mass loss on calcium-related disorders suggest that mass loss may affect postharvest calcium redistribution in the fruit. The fruit mass loss for refrigerated air and controlled atmosphere rooms can be estimated by collecting the defrost water from the refrigeration cooling coils and expressing this as a percentage of the initial total mass of fruit in the room. A ‘2-in-2’ guideline (up to 2% mass loss in the first 2 months) is proposed, but further research is needed to refine this guidance, especially for cultivars that may benefit from greater mass loss without increasing shrivelling or bitter pit.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.969
Threshold uncertainty score0.140

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.032
GPT teacher head0.279
Teacher spread0.247 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations3
Published2025
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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